The Magic Shop

How do your senses and memory work? What is the nature of consciousness? What sets your intelligence apart from that of animals and computers? Mind Readings urges your students to think carefully about such questions -- questions about cognition, or the process of thinking itself. Because many of the topics in the book deal directly with the skills students need in college -- such as interpreting and remembering what they read and communicating the ideas they find -- students are likely to improve these crucial skills. The readings themselves are memorable and worth talking about. Deborah Blum tries to convince your students that emotional sensitivity gives enormous advantages to women. Students weigh Francine Patterson and Wendy Gordon's claim that Koko, the gorilla who has mastered human language, deserves to be considered a person. A rich editorial apparatus helps students read texts closely, connect the ideas they encounter in the text to their life experiences, and extend the book's ideas to larger issues such as race, cultural memory, and the social conception of selfhood.

Warning: This book could change the way you read the Bible forever. As God's written Word to us, the Bible is the single most powerful agent for transforming our lives. But too often our Bible reading becomes routine and fails to engage our hearts as well as our minds. In Reading the Bible with Heart and Mind, Tremper Longman will help you discover the incredible power of the Scriptures to mold you into the character of Christ. "Even though the Bible is powerful," writes Longman, "we don't change just because we read it. Our minds may be engaged, but something needs to happen to our hearts as well." If you want to rekindle your passion for God's Word, this book will help you learn to accurately read, understand, and respond to God's Word in ways that will develop deep intimacy with Christ and transform you into His image.

What is the mind? Is consciousness a process in the brain? How do our minds represent the world? Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings is a grand tour of writings on these and other perplexing questions about the nature of the mind. The most comprehensive collection of its kind, the book includes sixty-three selections that range from the classical contributions of Descartes to the leading edge of contemporary debates. Extensive sections cover foundational issues, the nature of consciousness, and the nature of mental content. Three of the selections are published here for the first time, while many other articles have been revised especially for this volume. Each section opens with an introduction by the editor. Philosophy of Mind is suitable for students at all levels and also for general readers.

Educators agree that teacher modeling is a key component of good instruction but how do you model reading comprehension? What s the best way to present new information so your students can convert it to working knowledge and useable skills? This book DVD combination seamlessly blends current research about the brain and learning with classroom examples to show you how instructional modeling can lead to increased engagement and literacy learning. You ll learn what happens in the brain as a person reads and how to model your own thinking effectively. You also will meet a number of middle- and secondary-grade teachers who use modeling to help their students understand complex ideas. Chapters explore ways you can model comprehension and word solving strategies, as well as how to use text structures and text features to learn and retain information. The included DVD gives you an opportunity to see teacher modeling in action in real classrooms, and the final chapter in the book serves as a professional development guide with discussion questions that correspond to segments of the DVD.

"Thagard has chosen readings wisely, not just to complement his textbook, but as a short stand-alone anthology. The collection succeeds admirably." -- George Graham, Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Psychology, University of Alabama at Birmingham Mind Readings is a collection of accessible readings on some of the most important topics in cognitive science. Although anyone interested in the interdisciplinary study of mind will find the selections well worth reading, they work particularly well with Paul Thagard's textbook Mind: An Introduction Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 1996). The selections, all less than a decade old, provide further discussion on major topics discussed in the textbook. The first eight chapters present approaches to cognitive science from the perspective that thinking consists of computational procedures on mental representations. The remaining five chapters discuss challenges to the computational-representational understanding of mind. Contributors: John R. Anderson, Ruth M. J. Byrne, E. H. Durfee, Chris Eliasmith, Owen Flanagan, Dedre Gentner, Janice Glasgow, Philip N. Johnson-Laird, Alan Mackworth, Arthur B. Markman, Douglas L. Medin, Keith Oatley, Dimitri Papadias, Steven Pinker, David E. Rumelhart, Herbert A. Simon.