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Complex Thinking (complex + thinking)
Selected AbstractsValidity of High-Stakes Assessment: Are Students Engaged in Complex Thinking?EDUCATIONAL MEASUREMENT: ISSUES AND PRACTICE, Issue 3 2004Suzanne Lane The validity of high-stakes assessments and accountability systems is discussed in relation to the requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The extent to which content standards and assessments are cognitively rich, the challenges in setting performance standards, and the impact of high-stakes assessments on instruction and student learning are addressed. The article argues for quality content standards, cognitively rich assessments, and a cohesive, balanced assessment system. [source] Thinking Ahead: Complexity of Expectations and the Transition to ParenthoodJOURNAL OF PERSONALITY, Issue 2 2000S. Mark Pancer This study examined the integrative complexity of thinking in individuals making the transition to parenthood, and the relationship between complexity and adjustment during this period. Sixty-nine couples were interviewed 3 months before their babies were born, and 6 months after the birth. The prenatal interview focused on individuals' expectations about what it would be like being a parent; the postnatal interview focused on individuals' actual experiences as parents. In addition, participants completed measures of depression, self-esteem, and marital satisfaction after each interview, and a measure of stress after the 6-month postnatal interview. Both men and women demonstrated a significant increase in the complexity of their thinking from the prenatal to the postnatal interview, with women demonstrating higher levels of complexity at both times. In addition, women with more complex expectations demonstrated better adjustment after their babies were born than did women with simpler expectations; these results were not obtained for men. Results are discussed with regard to the way in which thinking about the self changes as one negotiates major life transitions, and the way in which complex thinking can help counter some of the stresses that individuals may experience at these times. [source] How and when does complex reasoning occur?JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SCIENCE TEACHING, Issue 6 2009Empirically driven development of a learning progression focused on complex reasoning about biodiversity Abstract In order to compete in a global economy, students are going to need resources and curricula focusing on critical thinking and reasoning in science. Despite awareness for the need for complex reasoning, American students perform poorly relative to peers on international standardized tests measuring complex thinking in science. Research focusing on learning progressions is one effort to provide more coherent science curricular sequences and assessments that can be focused on complex thinking about focal science topics. This article describes an empirically driven, five-step process to develop a 3-year learning progression focusing on complex thinking about biodiversity. Our efforts resulted in empirical results and work products including: (1) a revised definition of learning progressions, (2) empirically driven, 3-year progressions for complex thinking about biodiversity, (3) an application of statistical approaches for the analysis of learning progression products, (4) Hierarchical Linear Modeling results demonstrating significant student achievement on complex thinking about biodiversity, and (5) Growth Model results demonstrating strengths and weaknesses of the first version of our curricular units. The empirical studies present information to inform both curriculum and assessment development. For curriculum development, the role of learning progressions as templates for the development of organized sequences of curricular units focused on complex science is discussed. For assessment development, learning progression-guided assessments provide a greater range and amount of information that can more reliably discriminate between students of differing abilities than a contrasting standardized assessment measure that was also focused on biodiversity content. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 46: 610,631, 2009 [source] Herbert Gans and the Politics of Urban Ethnography in the (Continued) Age of the UnderclassCITY & COMMUNITY, Issue 1 2007Alford A. Young Jr. In his criticism of scholarly and public utilization of the term underclass, Herbert Gans helped to initiate new and more complex thinking about both the kinds of people that constitute America's most disenfranchised urban constituency and the ways in which more privileged Americans have striven to make sense of them. In forwarding his criticism of the term, Gans helped establish a template for ethnographic and qualitative explorations of America's urban poor that breaks with a rigid and vulgar social problems framing and, instead, invites more provocative and more accurate assessments of the agency of such people. In doing so, he has encouraged recent efforts to offer new framings of this population, which have facilitated new cultural projects in qualitative studies of the African American urban poor. This article briefly reviews Gans's criticism of the term underclass, and then elucidates how that criticism relates to some contemporary scholarly efforts to consider people who would be characterized as underclass as more complex cultural actors,and, indeed, who often are more complicated social beings,than is implied by the label underclass. [source] | ||||||||||