You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
New perspective on the relation between writing and the processes of thought.
Shows why reading and writing are essential to developing a consciousness of language that, in turn, lies at the core of rationality.
For well over a century educational reformers have looked for a breakthrough in the sciences of psychology and pedagogy that would dramatically improve the effectiveness of schooling. This book shows why such an ambition is an illusion. Schools are institutions which attempt to balance the needs of a bureaucratic society that funds them with the personal goals, interests, hopes and ambitions of the students who enroll in them. Reform efforts attempt to realign that balance without any clear conception of how the two are related. This book offers a theoretical account of the relation between the minds of learners and the institutional structure of the school that would account both for the ways that schooling remakes minds and societies and why such institutions are resistant to change.
When this book was first published, David Olson was examining the developing representation and use of diagonals in the context of much larger questions, questions also explored by Vygotsky, Cassirer, Gombrich, and Bruner. These include such issues as conceptual development, conceptual change, and stage-like transitions in one's knowledge and belief. Some of these problems remain at virtually the same stage of solution to this day. Other problems have indeed been solved or at least come closer to solution, leading the author to think about the precise cognitive representations that allowed for the cognitive growth he examined in such scrupulous detail. The author hopes that both readers and re-readers of this volume will be led to wonder -- as he did while working on the book -- just what there is about a simple diagonal that makes its reproduction so difficult. In so doing, readers will again be reminded of the remarkable resources that children bring to bear on their understanding of the world as well as the blind spots that no simple telling can quite fill in.
This handbook marks the transformation of the topic of literacy from the narrower concerns with learning to read and write to an interdisciplinary enquiry into the various roles of writing and reading in the full range of social and psychological functions in both modern and developing societies. It does so by exploring the nature and development of writing systems, the relations between speech and writing, the history of the social uses of writing, the evolution of conventions of reading, the social and developmental dimensions of acquiring literate competencies, and, more generally, the conceptual and cognitive dimensions of literacy as a set of social practices. Contributors to the volume are leading scholars drawn from such disciplines as linguistics, literature, history, anthropology, psychology, the neurosciences, cultural psychology, and education.
Modes of Thought addresses a topic of broad interest to the cognitive sciences. Its central focus is on the apparent contrast between the widely assumed 'psychological unity of mankind' and the facts of cognitive pluralism, the diverse ways in which people think and the developmental, cultural, technological and institutional factors which contribute to that diversity. Whether described in terms of modes of thought, cognitive styles, or sensibilities, the diversity of patterns of rationality to be found between cultures, in different historical periods, between individuals at different stages of development remains a central problem for a cultural psychology. Modes of Thought brings together anthropologists, historians, psychologists and educational theorists who manage to recognise the universality in thinking and yet acknowledge the cultural, historical and developmental contexts in which differences arise.
The chapters collected in this volume represent the "state-of-the-art" of research on the development of intentional action and intentional understanding--topics that are at the intersection of current research on imitation, early understanding of mental states, goal-directed behavior in nonhuman animals, executive function, language acquisition, and narrative understanding, to name just a few of the relevant foci. Collectively, the contributors demonstrate that intentionality is a key issue in the cognitive and social sciences. Moreover, in a way that was anticipated more than a century ago by the seminal work of J. Mark Baldwin, they are beginning to reveal how the control of action is related in development to children's emerging self-conscious and their increasingly sophisticated appreciation of other people's perspectives. This volume brings together the world's leading researchers on early social and cognitive development in an in-depth exploration of children's understanding of themselves and others.
Literacy is a concern of all nations of the world, whether they be classified as developed or undeveloped. A person must be able to read and write in order to function adequately in society, and reading and writing require a script. But what kinds of scripts are in use today, and how do they influence the acquisition, use and spread of literacy? Scripts and Literacy is the first book to systematically explore how the nature of a script affects how it is read and how one learns to read and write it. It reveals the similarities underlying the world's scripts and the features that distinguish how they are read. Scholars from different parts of the world describe several different scripts, e.g. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian Amerindian -- and how they are learned. Research data and theories are presented. This book should be of primary interest to educators and researchers in reading and writing around the world.
This account of children's learning to ascribe understanding to themselves and others may help to explain children's theory of mind.
This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures offering a very clear account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology. In the course of his study, Walter J. Ong offers fascinating insights into oral genres across the globe and through time, and examines the rise of abstract philosophical and scientific thinking. He considers the impact of orality-literacy studies not only on literary criticism and theory but on our very understanding of what it is to be a human being, conscious of self and other. This is a book no reader, writer or speaker should be without.