Reviews: Chapter and Book Reviews
Reviews by Clifford J. F. Morris
2007 The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance by Anders Ericsson, Neil Charness, Paul Feltovich and Robert Hoffman is a very huge (918 pages) but valuable volume that fills a significant void in the scientific literature on expertise. The handbook offers comprehensive and up to date information to anyone interested in the overall nature of expertise and expert performance. Published in June of 2006, the volume bring together a stellar group of researchers who provide excellent overviews of the historical development of research on a wide range of topics related to expertise. Moreover, they update the literature providing state-of-the-art insights, identify and clarify key unresolved issues in the field, and offer a wealth of ideas for future research. The volume is an essential reference for anyone interested in the topic of expert performance and should be accessible to the wide audience from researchers to undergraduates that the editors intended. The explosive growth of knowledge in expertise development makes summarizing current knowledge a phenomenal task, and the editors and chapter authors have done a very good job at it. Many recent, relevant research papers are cited and described in appropriate length and detail. To read my full review, click on the book image.
2006 The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking & Reasoning by Keith J. Holyoak and Robert G. Morrison. My review of this handbook will be published in issue 15(1) of Mind, Culture and Activity. Then, I shall place a greater summary here. In the interim, here is a brief overview.
The time may now be ripe to review the research behind thinking and reasoning - two vital processes driving our brains, our many minds, and our intelligences. Both editors feel that the area of cognitive research has been regularly neglected and overlooked as a fundamental research topic. Hence, their timely (2005) publication of The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, a brilliant but bulky book chock-full of specialized chapters covering leading-edge themes in thinking and reasoning with scholarly mastery and insight. This tome, with its encyclopedic coverage of 858 pages, represents a definitive Handbook on both fields of cognitive inquiry. Holyoak and Morrison wanted more than a typical cognitive psychology textbook with chapters on categorization, thinking, and reasoning; they felt that such a definitive handbook did not exist. It is their hope that this Handbook fills that void. In my opinion, they have succeeded!
2005 Being Smart About Gifted Children: A Guidebook for Parents and Educators by Dona Matthews and Joanne Foster provides anyone associated with education with an outstanding overview of the current state of gifted education from multiple contexts and theoretical perspectives. Authors Drs. Matthew and Foster, both experienced gifted educators, do a remarkable job creating the "best possible learning fit" (p. 189) for gifted children. Throughout this well-written book, they introduce the reader to numerous lists of practical teaching strategies and proven recommendation that will indeed aid all types of educators -- be they parents, psychologists, school counsellors or school administrators, current and future teachers -- as they try to identify and program exceptional abilities for all gifted children. Or to cite the authors directly, "[they] concern [themselves] primarily with those whose learning needs are not well met without some kind of adaptation to the regular curriculum. those whose time [would] be wasted in school if no accommodations [were] made for their exceptionality" (p. 145). To see the rest of my review, click on the image of the book's front cover.
2005 Michael Cole, Karl Levitin and Alexander Romanovich Luria's The Autobiography of Alexander Luria: A Dialogue with The Making of Mind The Autobiography of Alexander Luria A Dialogue with The Making of Mind is the title to a recent book dedicated to Alexander Romanovich Luria, one of the most prominent Russian scientists of the 20th century. For some forty years, Luria conducted research with great success on the functions of the brain such as analyzed the changes in function as a result of local brain lesions, attention, learning and forgetting and perception. As his academic life spanned a sizeable section of the last one hundred years, this expanded and revised autobiography gives readers a glimpse on the development of neurology and psychology in Russia. Thus, I feel that this 'new' version will be of great interest to an ever expanding number of Luria followers.
The autobiography provides a detailed and careful description of the life and academic career of Alexander Romanovich, as edited by Michael Cole, one of the leading psychologist in the social sciences and a distinguished American cross-cultural theoretician and Karl Levitin, a Russian science journalist. This updated text is the second edition of Luria's original 1979 autobiography The Making of Mind: A personal account of Soviet Psychology. That original autobiography has gone out of print, and is not readily available.
To see my full review, click on the title.
2002 Geoffrey Walford's Doing a Doctorate in Educational Ethnography Doing a Doctorate in Educational Ethnography provides us with a first-rate introduction to the qualitative research school of educational ethnography from multiple contexts and theoretical perspectives. Some eleven ethnographic researchers contributed. I found the 214-pages of this book to be a well-arranged series of stories of post-graduate students who undertook a qualitative research study to complete their doctoral dissertations. Walford’s research foci are the relationships between central government policy and local processes of implementation, choice of schools, religiously-based schools, private schools and, for the purpose of this book review, qualitative research methodology. Walford successfully created an exciting collection of papers dealing with a central question often asked by qualitative field researchers, “What are some of the key research problems in my field site and how have they been managed?” I felt that the chapter authors well responded to that essential enquiry. To see my full review, click on the title.
Different Windows into the Same Room: Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences My review of Becoming a Multiple Intelligences School by Thomas R. Hoerr, Multiple Intelligences and Student Achievement: Success Stories from Six Schools by Linda Campbell and Bruce Campbell, Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom, 2nd Edition by Thomas Armstrong, and ADD/ADHD Alternatives in the classroom by Thomas Armstrong]. Professionally Speaking.
2000
Have you considered restructuring your classroom program or your entire school program to incorporate Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (MI)? If so, then these four books are a must read. In Becoming a Multiple Intelligences School, Thomas Hoerr presents an insider’s account of how to apply MI. His details on the 10-year process he and his colleagues encountered are thoroughly outlined. His comments on how to develop new assessment for tracking and reporting student growth are both refreshing and innovative. Linda and Bruce Campbell’s Multiple Intelligences and Student Achievement provides a fascinating commentary on implementing MI in six schools that have used it for at least five years. Their case study approach chronicles the application for all types of students. To access my short review of all of the three (3) books, click on the front cover image, scroll down the left hand column to "Reviews" and then scroll down to the third review.
1999 Howard Gardner's Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century In 1983, a Harvard University psychologist, Howard Gardner, wrote Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, a book that he believed he was writing predominantly to enlighten mainstream psychologists, not classroom educators. In Frames, he proposed a novel notion: that the psychological construct intelligence be formally measured in more ways than simply through dry statistical analytical lenses of widely accepted logical / linguistic IQ-type formalized tests, tests standardized for most schooling systems. Gardner questioned the classical belief that we could have only one mode of representation about life. Instead, he suggested that a more pluralistic viewpoint for measuring mental functioning ought be addressed -- a variety of intelligent ways of thinking.
In his second 1999 book, Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century, Gardner once again acquaints his followers with another first rate book that continues the argument he made in earlier books, that there are multiple forms of intelligences. Although "he introduces the possibility of three new intelligences (but canonizes only existential intelligence and naturalist intelligence)" (book jacket, inside front cover), Gardner, feels that what is more important is how people make use of MI to carry out daily tasks prized in the culture. This latter statement was well summarized during a recent interview when Gardner said "The fact that we have the same intelligences means that we can communicate with one another. But the fact that we represent things mentally in numerous symbolic systems to one another means that we are not necessarily going to construe things in the same way or see the same options." To see my full review, click on the title. To read a shorter review, go to http://www.oct.ca/publications/professionally_speaking/march_2000/front.htm , scroll down the left hand column to "Reviews"
1999 Rene Diaz-Lefebvre's Coloring Outside the Lines: Applying Multiple Intelligences and Creativity in Learning Coloring Outside the Lines: Applying Multiple Intelligences and Creativity in Learning begins with the poignant story for Javier, a student with the capacity to learn, but does not perform well on tests. Using examples from different disciplines, Dr. Diaz-Lefebvre leads the reader step-by-step on how to use the Multiple Intelligences and Learning for Understanding (MI/LfU) model to teach for retention and UNDERSTANDING. The book answers the instructor's perennial concern of motivating students to review assigned readings. Through thought provoking quotes, the book captures the essence of teaching and learning: "The right angle to solve a difficult problem is the try-angle (Levitt)." The students in their own words relate how much they enjoy using their different intelligences. To see my full review, click on the title.
1997 Howard Gardner, Thomas Hatch and Bruce Torff's A third perspective: The Symbol Systems Approach to Intelligence Over the past 40 years, I have spent numerous hours with parents of students formally registered under my daily classroom charge. During such interactions, I have often been asked by these mothers and fathers to assist them as they attempt to interpret their offspring's intellectual makeup. At times, many of them tend to wonder if the intellectual behaviors of their own boys and girls stemmed solely from a heredity-genetic set of factors, or if their youngsters are smart children due to their environmental-cultural environment. This type of question has been often asked with no clear definitive answer ... that is, until now. To see my chapter review, click on the title.
1996 Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeaure of Man Revised and Expanded Edition In 1981, the late Stephen Jay Gould wrote The Mismeasure of Man, published mainly to argue against serious social and political suggestions earlier scribed by Arthur R. Jensen in his 1969 famous article How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement? Then, in 1996, Gould produced a revised and expanded version of the same book as a response to Richard L. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's 1994 book The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life.
In Thoughts at Age Fifteen, the sub-title to his new introduction to the Revised and Expanded Edition of The Mismeasure of Man, Gould, calls himself a "working scientist by trade" (p. 24), then "a statistically minded paleontologist" (p. 25), and finally "an evolutionary biologist by training" (p. 41). The author of thirteen books, Mr. Gould currently teaches geology, the history of science and biology at Harvard University. Gould's strong interest in intelligence initially arose from his desire to bring science and its discoveries to the attention of the non-scientist. To see my full review, click on the title. And to read John Carroll's review, click on the book's front cover image.