Advances in Instructional Psychology

The contributors to this volume address reasoning and problem solving as fundamental to learning and teaching and to modern literacy. The research on expertise and the development of competence makes it clear that structures of knowledge and cognitive process should be tightly linked throughout education to attain high levels of ability. The longstanding pedagogical assumption that the attainment of useful knowledge proceeds from lower level learning based on the practice of fundamental skills that demand little thought, to higher level competence in which problem solving finally plays an increasing role, is no longer tenable. It is now clear that thinking is not an outcome of basic learning, but is part of…