If one were to conduct an analysis of any profession the "ability to think analogically" is more than likely to be one of the requirements for success, be it an architectural studio, a research laboratory, a legal office, or a nuclear plant. Cognitive scientists are aware of the prominence of analogical reasoning in all forms of reasoning and learning, and have devoted substantial effort to ascer taining its nature. Test builders, like cognitive scientists, are aware of the cen trality of analogical reasoning and figure, correctly, that a test that samples a student's ability to think analogically may well be a good predictor of success in a variety of fields. This book is the result of a project to investigate analogical reasoning from both an individual differences and a cognitive perspective. The book is directed to both researchers and practitioners concerned with the nature and measurement of analogical reasoning. Cognitive scientists, linguists, psycholinguists, and natural language researchers will find the seman tic taxonomy and accompanying empirical results food for thought. Test devel opers will fmd it reassuring that performance on verbal analogy items is not just a reflection of the size of a person's vocabulary, and that tests can be designed according to principles, rather than assembled to satisfy a set of statistical speci fications. Psychometricians will find that content and response modelling can go together and that there are distinct benefits in approaching psychometric re sponse modelling from that integrative perspective.

Focusing on the teaching and learning of science concepts at the elementary and high school levels, this volume bridges the gap between state-of-the-art research and classroom practice in science education. The contributors -- science educators, cognitive scientists, and psychologists -- draw clear connections between theory, research, and instructional application, with the ultimate goal of improving science teachers' effectiveness in the classroom. Toward this end, explicit models, illustrations, and examples drawn from actual science classes are included.

The concept of analogy is of central concern to modern cognitive scientists, whereas it has been largely neglected in linguistics in the past four decades. The goal of this thought-provoking book is (1) to introduce a cognitively and linguistically viable notion of analogy; and (2) to re-establish and build on traditional linguistic analogy-based research. As a starting point, a general definition of analogy is offered that makes the distinction between analogy-as-structure and analogy-as-process. Chapter 2 deals with analogy as used in traditional linguistics. It demonstrates how phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and diachronic linguistics make use of analogy and discusses linguistic domains in which analogy does or did not work. The appendix gives a description of a computer program, which performs such instances of analogy-based syntactic analysis as have long been claimed impossible. Chapter 3 supports the ultimate (non-modular) 'unity of the mind' and discusses the existence of pervasive analogies between language and such cognitive domains as vision, music, and logic. The final chapter presents evidence for the view that the cosmology of every culture is based on analogy. At a more abstract level, the role of analogy in scientific change is scrutinized, resulting in a meta-analogy between myth and science.