Book excerpt: First Published in 1985, Currently, two streams of endeavor offer promise for improving school effectiveness in developing students’ higher cognitive capacities. One of these is represented by the increased interest of school districts, colleges, and universities in identifying ways to help their students build the cognitive skills that enable them to learn and think effectively. What can be done, they ask, beyond teaching the fundamentals of reading, writing, arithmetic, and subject-matter knowledge, to enable students to use their skills and knowledge for effective problem solving, reasoning, and comprehension? The second stream is apparent in recent scientific advances in the study of intelligence, human development, problem solving, the structure of acquired knowledge, and the skills of learning. This is volume two of a collection of conference papers based on this topic.