Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 1993. / Includes bibliography (leaves 282-291).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1967. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 1993. / Includes bibliography (leaves 282-291).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1986. / Vita. Bibliography: leaves [189]-207.

M.A. (Philosophy) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

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The purpose of this study was to determine whether the direct instruction and guided practice of question-generating as a thinking skill was an influence on students' higher-level thinking skills. Additionally, this study investigated the levels of questions generated by the students throughout the five week study. Thirty sixth grade students in a Southwestern urban public elementary school were instructed daily in the use of Bloom's taxonomy as a guide in designing and composing questions. Higher levels of the taxonomy were emphasized for higher-level question generating (analysis, synthesis, and evaluation). A pre- and posttest measuring cognitive abilities was given to determine the level of the students' higher-level thinking skills. Scores were analyzed to determine the influence of the treatment. A significance difference was found between means by use of a t-test for correlated samples. Student questions generated throughout the study were coded according to Bloom's taxonomy levels by independent coders with a reliability of .93. Qualitative matrices were developed to display the levels, numbers, and percentages of the questions generated. A significant increase of higher-level questions were generated between week one (3.8%) and week five (80.5%). A shift occurred in the fourth week, with a higher percentage (61.7) of higher-level questions generated than lower-level (38.3). The results indicate support for the proposition that the direct instruction and guided practice in question generating as a thinking skill influenced students' higher-level thinking skills. The analysis of the question levels suggest support for recommendation that autonomy follows with mastery of instruction and guided practice in the thinking skill before using that skill in a new content area. Guided practice in this study was in the familiar content area of reading.

Results from curriculum enactment and sociolinguistic research have indicated that lessons are composed of information exchanges consisting of mostly facts and procedures that place little cognitive demand on students. Scholars from these areas have ascribed the characteristics of the school, teacher, student, management and task demands, or linguistic, and/or social context as explanations for those observations. They have not made a direct connection between how teachers and students decide who takes responsibility for providing the intellectual content of lessons and how that decision affects the students' higher order contributions. Consequently, the present study was designed to examine the way teachers and students cooperated for effective information exchanges and how that cooperative effort influenced students' higher order contributions. One hundred twelve chemistry and mathematics tutorials formed the data. The volunteer tutors possessed extensive training in their subject areas and the problems for discussion were designed to make high cognitive demands on the volunteer students. Methods from discourse analysis were used to develop an analytical model to identify, describe, and compare how the tutors and students exchanged information. The model was applied to the data to provide information on the following topics; the roles of the tutor and student, the substance of the exchanges, and the use of mediation strategies. Next, a code of conduct known as Grice's (1975) theory of conversational implicature was used to interpret the results of the analysis. The aim was to link conversational cooperation with students' higher order contributions to the discourse. First, the results indicated a model can be developed to describe, compare, and categorize instructional conversations. Second, tutors and students cooperate to maintain their roles during instruction and mediation strategies support those roles. Third, tutors and students intuitively follow Grice's (1975) conversational code of conduct to support their roles during their information exchanges. This cooperative effort is rooted in the conditions for conversational implicature. It was found when teachers and students explicitly negotiate and accept new intellectual roles before instruction (the conditions for implicature), higher order thinking can be encouraged by teachers and contributed by students to instructional conversations.