Visual arts education focuses on creating original visual art products. A means to improve originality is enhancement of divergent thinking, indicated by fluency, flexibility and originality of ideas. In regular arts lessons, divergent thinking is mostly promoted through brainstorming. In a previous study, we found positive effects of an explicit instruction of metacognition on fluency and flex...

In higher education students are often faced with information problems: tasks or assignments that require them to identify information needs, locate corresponding information sources, extract and organize relevant information from each source, and synthesize information from a variety of sources. Explicit and intensive instruction is necessary, because solving information problems is a complex ...

critical thinking is one of the major aims of education, and its prerequisite is to have thoughtful teachers with critical thinking viewpoints. there have been numerous models for critical thinking including two major psychological and socio-political ones. the present article has considered a comparative study of critical thinking from the viewpoints of robert ennis and henry giroux considerin...

The ability to interpret and reason from Tree of Life (ToL) diagrams has become a vital component of science literacy in the 21st century. This article reports on the effectiveness of a research-based curriculum, including an instructional booklet, laboratory, and lectures, to teach the fundamentals of such tree thinking in an introductory biology class for science majors. We present the result...

Improving the quality of student thinking should be given a high priority in any educational system as good thinking is essential in meeting the challenges of living in a rapidly changing and technologically oriented world. Research on thinking convinced that skillful thinking process can be inculcated in students if thinking skills are taught explicitly and are integrated into content instruct...

background: enhancing nursing students’ critical thinking is a challenge faced by nurse educators. this study aimed at determiningthe effect of clinical concept mapping on discipline-based critical thinking of nursing students. materials and methods: in this quasi-experimental post-test only design, a convenient sample of 4th year nursing students (n = 32)participated. they were randomly divide...