The development of thinking skills teaching in schools has been strongly influenced by the work of certain leading individuals. These people have pioneered different approaches to teaching thinking, and their ideas have then influenced the development of other programmes. Subsequently, as teachers have used these approaches there has been an exchange of ideas and techniques between the different methods and an increasing emphasis on how the approaches work so that they can be integrated into teaching more generally. The aim of this section is to provide some background information about the history and development of thinking skills programmes and approaches to teaching and learning. This information should then help to clarify the intentions of those responsible for the early development of such approaches and explain the way that their thinking has influenced subsequent work in thinking skills. This, in turn, underpins the classification of the thinking skills programmes and approaches in the database.

Reuven Feuerstein and Instrumental Enrichment
After the World War II, a large number of young people flooded into Israel from Europe and North Africa. Many of them had suffered traumatic early experiences and many more had not experienced an upbringing which had provided them with consistent family or cultural influences. On traditional psychometric tests, such as IQ tests or standardised tests of achievement, many of those youngsters scored so badly as to appear ineducable.

Rather than simply accept this conclusion and close the door on any kind of recovery, Reuven Feuerstein, who was engaged in trying to integrate young immigrants, devised ways of finding out exactly what cognitive functions they were deficient in; how they could be helped to develop these functions, what each individual's potential for learning was.

What Feuerstein developed was a set of techniques that helped these learners succeed on subsequent tests. These methods were termed 'dynamic', in the sense that they were studying the process of learning and the change that took place, (and as opposed to 'static' traditional testing methods). Feuerstein argued that such a process was much more likely to predict how a person might then learn in the future (Feuerstein, Rand, Hoffman, and Miller, 1980). The complex diagnostic instrument which Feuerstein and his colleagues completed is called the Learning Potential Assessment Device (LPAD). It measures an individual's intellectual change, known as 'cognitive modifiability' (Sharron and Coulter, 1994).

Another set of activities or 'instruments' was built up, to form a programme of activities, by which an adult could intervene and help children's learning processes. Different tasks were devised, to tackle different underlying difficulties of functioning. As the whole process is an enriching one, the programme (comprising all of the 'instruments') was labelled 'Instrumental Enrichment' (IE). 

The instruments can be used with individuals, groups or whole classes. Groups or classes are generally preferred, in that they give opportunities for learning through discussion and through witnessing other children's learning processes.

The instruments are pencil-and paper based. The whole course is usually expected to take three years, though gains have been recorded from using the instruments advocated for use in the first two years. Usually, two instruments are taught together (in alternate sessions). Each instrument concentrates on a specific set of underlying cognitive functions, though considerable overlap has been built into them. As learning becomes more complex, the same concepts and skills are re-introduced, at higher levels of conceptualisation, according to a planned 'spiral curriculum'. Many of Feuerstein's ideas have influenced work on teaching  thinking skills, in  particular his innovative theory of mediated learning.

Matthew Lipman and Philosophy for Children
Another important pioneer in what in the United States is termed the Critical Thinking movement, and which we talk about in the UK as the thinking skills, is the American philosopher, Matthew Lipman. Originally a university philosophy professor, Lipman was unhappy at what he saw as poor thinking in his students. He became convinced that something was wrong with the way they had been taught in school when they were younger. They seemed to have been encouraged to learn facts and to accept authoritative opinions, but not to think for themselves. He therefore left his post and founded the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children (I.A.P.C.) at Montclair State College, New Jersey. For the last forty years decades, he and his colleagues have been developing material for use in schools, aimed at helping young people (from 6 year-olds to late adolescents) to think.

The programme is called 'Philosophy for Children'. One of Lipman's basic convictions is that children are natural philosophers, in the sense that they view the world about them with curiosity and wonder. That is all that is needed as a starting-point for enquiry, which can legitimately be termed 'philosophical'.

The I.A.P.C. has produced a number of novels, into every page of which, strange and anomalous points have been woven. As a class reads a page, with the teacher, the text encourages them to raise queries. These queries form the basis of guided discussions. The teacher does not try to control what questions are asked, since it is the children's curiosity which needs to be tapped, in order to promote active participation and active learning. The text, itself, steers the children's questions into certain areas, suitable for exploration, and the novels provide a model of philosophical enquiry, in that they involve fictional children engaging in argument, debate, discussion and exploratory thinking.

The children in the novels are not rigidly portrayed as having reached such-and-such a stage of development, because they have reached such-and-such an age. Lipman firmly believes that levels of sophistication in thinking are arrived at by practice in appropriate forms of thinking, not according to biological development, or to any form of stages of development, such as those identified by the Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget. As soon as children can speak, they are using reasoning, according to Lipman.

Both Feuerstein and Lipman, though from very different starting-points, hold a similar belief in children's abilities. They consider that through thinking exercises and activities learners can exceed the predicted level of competence which psychometric or school-based tests may have suggested is their limit.

On balance, research findings have vindicated such claims. See, for example Sharron and Coulter (1994) or Romney and Samuels (2001) for results of projects using IE, and I.A.P.C.'s literature, which quote results of a validation project carried out by an independent testing agency, on over 2,000 children: compared with control children, they made large gains, after a year, for Maths, larger gains for English and even larger ones for reasoning. The results for Philosophy for Children have been replicated in other countries, such as Iceland (Sigurborsdottir, 1998) and other subjects such as science (Sprod, 1998).

It should be noted that gains on specific assessment procedures, which test performance on items not specifically taught for in the thinking skills programmes, also provide evidence for the modifiability of intelligence, as well as for transfer of learned skills.

Thinking skills in the UK
The pioneering work of Feuerstein and Lipman, as well as other leading figures such as Edward de Bono, have inspired a wide range of work in the UK. Nickerson, Perkins and Smith (1985) listed thirty different programmes. Since then, at least as many again have appeared. Some approaches to 'teaching thinking' (Sternberg and Berg, 1992) have attempted to look at this extensive range of programmes and their underpinning theories and classroom techniques and have attempted to distil key elements to identify techniques which can be more easily adopted by practitioners. Examples of a wide range of programmes abound, such as to promote problem-solving with a cycle such as TASC (Thinking Actively in a Social Context: Wallace and Adams, 1993) or using advance organisers as in ACTS (Activating Children's Thinking Skills: McGuinness, 1999) drawing on the work of Schwartz and Parks in the United States; or other infusion approaches in specific subjects through the use of particular teaching or 'pedagogical' strategies (based on the work of the Thinking Skills Research Centre at Newcastle University e.g. Thinking through Geography: Leat, 1998; Thinking Through Primary Teaching: Higgins, 2001; Thinking Through History: Fisher, 2002). These resulting hybrid approaches are then hard to classify though elements from the other approaches can be seen. Of particular note is the work of Philip Adey and Michael Shayer at Kings College in London.  Through the original Cognitive Acceleration Through Science Education (CASE) project which was developed in the 1980s and early 1990s for Key Stage 3 Science, their work now extends into other subjects and age groups and has perhaps the best research and most robust evidence of the impact of thinking skills in the UK (for a summary see Shayer and Adey, 2002). Most programmes and approaches acknowledge the importance of language, articulation and discussion as a key element, for some such as 'Thinking Together' (Dawes et al. 2000) it forms both the underpinning rationale as well as the pedagogy.  Philosophy for Children has also been developed extensively in the UK and uses a structured approach to classroom discussion as a key element in the approach. The influence of Robert Fisher in developing classroom resources to develop a 'community of enquiry' is particularly significant, as is the work of Karin Murris and the Society for the Advancement of Philosophical Enquiry in Education (SAPERE).

The classification in the database is influenced by this history. The 'philosophical' category reflects the tradition of Matthew Lipman and the development of Philosophy for Children; the 'cognitive' the work of Reuven Feuerstein (and other psychological theories) as well as the impact of teaching approaches. Edward de Bono's influence, amongst others, can be identified in the 'Brain-based approaches'. There are clear similarities in each of the categories.

References
Dawes, L. Mercer, N and Wegerif, R. (2000) Thinking Together: A Programme of activities for developing thinking skills at KS2 Birmingham: Questions Publishing.

DeBono, E. (1970) Lateral Thinking London: Penguin.

DeBono, E. (1992) Teach Your Child to Think London: Penguin.

Feuerstein, R. Rand, Y., Hoffman, M.B. and Miller, R. (1980) Instrumental Enrichment: an intervention programme for cognitive modifiability Baltimore: University Park Press.

Fisher, P. (Editor) (2001) Thinking Through History Cambridge: Chris Kington Publishing.

Higgins, S. (2001) Thinking Through Primary Teaching Cambridge: Chris Kington Publishing

Leat, D. (1998) Thinking Through Geography Cambridge: Chris Kington Publishing.

Leat, D. and Higgins S. (2002) The role of powerful pedagogical strategies in curriculum development The Curriculum Journal 13.1 pp 71-85.

Lipman, M., Sharp, A. and Oscanyan, F. (1980) Philosophy in the Classroom Princeton: Temple University Press.

McGuinness, C. (1999) From Thinking Skills to Thinking Classrooms: a review and evaluation of approaches for developing pupils' thinking London: DFEE Research Report RR115.

Romney, D.M. and Samuels, M. T. (2001) A meta-analytic evaluation of Feuerstein's Instrumental Enrichment program Education and Child Psychology 18.4 pp 19-34.

Sharron, H. and Coulter, M (1994) Changing Children's Minds: Feuerstein's Revolution in the teaching of Intelligence Birmingham: Questions Publishing Company

Shayer, M. and Adey, P. (2002) Learning Intelligence Buckingham: Open University Press

Sigurborsdottir, I. (1998) Philosophy with Children in Foldaborg International Journal of Early Childhood 30.1 pp 14-16.

Sprod T. (1998) 'I Can Change Your Opinion on That': Social Constructivist Whole Class Discussions and Their Effect on Scientific Reasoning Research in Science Education 28.4 pp 463-80.

Sternberg, R.J. and Berg, C.A. (1992) Intellectual Development Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wallace, B. and Adams, H.B. TASC: Thinking Actively in a Social Context Oxford: AB Academic Publishers.