Teaching Thinking Skills

A course was developed to teach cognitive skills that apply to learning and intellectual performance independently of subject matter, stressing observation and classification, reasoning, critical use of language, problem solving, inventiveness, and decision making. With pretests and posttests, it was taught experimentally to over 400 Venezuelan seventh graders, whose classes were matched to those of a control group. Although evaluation of such a course is conceptually difficult and long-term effects have not been assessed, standard and special objective tests and various subjective tests indicate consistently that the course had sizable, beneficial effects on its students. Interest in classroom teaching of generally useful thinking skills has increased markedly. The prospects of improving intellectual competence have been discussed in several conferences and workshops, and intervention programs developed in several countries have recently been reviewed under the auspices of the National Institute of Education (Nickerson, Perkins, & Smith, 1985). This article de- scribes one such program that was distinguished by an eclectic approach to the conceptual structure of the cur- riculum and a relatively extensive evaluation of results. The program described here was initiated by the Venezuelan government, which requested the assistance of Harvard University. From the onset, the collaboration also included researchers at Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. and in the Venezuelan Ministry of Education. The larger program in Venezuela of which this project was a part was described in Science (Walsh, 1981) and in the APA Monitor (Cordes, 1985). Although the course ma- terials were developed for Venezuelan schools, in partic- ular the seventh grade, and much attention was given to ensuring the appropriateness of the materials to that cul- ture, they have since been published in English (Adams, 1986a). The course was designed to enhance performance on a wide variety of tasks that require careful observation and classification, deductive or inductive reasoning, crit- ical use of language, hyiaothesis generation and testing, problem solving, inventiveness, and decision making. The focus was on cognitive skills that apply to learning and intellectual performance independently of subject matter, rather than conventional academic content. Skills that can reasonably be considered to be components of intel- ligence and that are sufficiently well defined to lend themselves to explicit instruction were the targets of the course. The design and preparation of the course material began in the fall of 1980. About a dozen experienced Venezuelan teachers worked with the project staff during part of the summer of 1981, becoming familiar with the material and suggesting modifications. Some of these teachers later trained the Venezuelan teachers who would actually teach the course in its final form, at which time they supervised the classroom teaching. During the sec- ond academic year, 1981-1982, some of the material was tested in Venezuelan classrooms and evaluated informally by the teachers, after which the material was further modified. Also during that year the remainder of the course was prepared, as were the testing instruments that were to be used for formal evaluation of the course during the academic year 1982-1983. Various tests of mental abilities were adapted, de- veloped, and used during the second year. Two main pur- poses were served by the testing at this stage: The first was to assess the feasibility of the tests and to adapt them where necessary for Venezuelan seventh graders. The sec- ond purpose was to find schools in which the distributions of test scores were sufficiently similar to permit the se- lection of comparable experimental and control groups for the third year. Besides several standard tests of general aptitude, some 500 test items reflecting the evolving con- tent of the experimental course were written, of which about 70% were administered to samples of schoolchil- dren. The resulting Target Abilities Tests, as well as the final set of standard mental abilities tests, are described later.