New Conceptions of Thinking: A Special Issue of educational Psychologist

by David N. Perkins (Editor)

What makes thinking good? Although both the general processes and the expertise views point to important dimensions of cognition, neither seems to present a full picture. This special issue explores new conceptions of effective thinking that push beyond both. The authors identify new dimensions of cognition that invite a more complex, expanded conception of good thinking -- one that may include, but is not limited to, general processes and expertise. Discussions feature:
* an argument that the cognitive concepts embedded within language provide children with cognitive structures for interpreting utterances and holding beliefs
* the key role of epistemic games in good thinking
* the importance of "mindfulness" -- an open, probabilistic state of mind that involoves the drawing of novel distinctions and the examination of new perspectives
* the significance of abstract conceptual structures in thinking
* a synthesis of several new views of thinking, including the ones put forth in this special issue, and an argument for a new, expanded conception of mind.
The papers collected in this volume bring genuinely fresh perspectives to bear on the nature of good thinking and what education can do to cultivate it. The contributions rest not so much in supplanting a dominant view, but rather in expanding it by prefiguring new directions in the study and teaching of thinking.

88 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1993

About the author

David Perkins is a founding member of Harvard Project Zero, a basic research project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education investigating human symbolic capacities and their development. For many years, he served as co-director, and is now senior co-director and a member of the steering committee. Perkins conducts research on creativity in the arts and sciences, informal reasoning, problem solving, understanding, individual and organizational learning, and the teaching of thinking skills. He has participated in curriculum projects addressing thinking, understanding, and learning in Colombia, Israel, Venezuela, South Africa, Sweden, Holland, Australia, and the United States. He is actively involved in school change. Perkins was one of the principal developers of WIDE World, a distance learning model practitioners now embedded in programs at HGSE. He is the author of numerous publications, including fourteen authored or co-authored books. His books include; The Eureka Effect, about creativity; King Arthurs Round Table, about organizational intelligence and learning; Making Learning Whole, a general framework for deepening education at all levels; and Future Wise, about what's worth teaching for the contemporary era.