Dimensions,Cognitive Skills

The overall views of dimensions, cognitive skills and listening skills have a few things in common. Cognitive development plays a significant role in a person's ability to think critically as well as perception and strategic planning. "Professors have proposed the idea that cognitive development consisted of the development of logical competence, and that the development of this competence consists of four major stages" (Emory University, 2003, p. 34). Generalizations of this concept are possible and different fields of study will define their spaces by their own relevant dimensions, and use these spaces as frameworks upon which other studies are based (University of Alberta, 2003). This paper discusses the dimensions of mathematics as well as an overview of cognitive skill listening skills, perception and strategic planning

A dimension is a Latin word meaning "measured out" (Hall, 1996). A dimension is a parameter or measurement required to define the characteristics of an object. Dimension can be described in size and an object of space like a room (Wikipedia.com, 2007). When mathematicians and physicists talk about dimensions, they mean the number of independent coordinates needed to specify any point in a given space (SuperStringTheory.com, 2007). Dimensions are also demonstrated in the way we live, talk, and go on with our everyday lives. According to the Super String Theory (2007) "dimensions actually do not perceive them but they form the frame in which they perceive events" (p. 1). This would allow people to explore dimensions in a larger perspective of life.

According to Isaac Newton, time is universal for all objects no matter their motion, relative to one another (Miller and Rollnick, 2002). This point of view held until Einstein changed it because he was bothered that it wasn't consistent with the propagation of light as electromagnetic radiation (SuperStringTheory.com, 2007). If time is a coordinate, then instead of three coordinates to describe a point in space, we have four coordinates to describe an event in space time. This is why it is said that our space time has four dimensions.

Dimensions are the parameters required to describe the position and relevant characteristics of any object within a conceptual space where the dimension of a space is the total number of different parameters used for all possible objects considered in the a model (Wikipedia.com, 2007). For example, locating a point on a plane requires two parameters latitude and longitude. The corresponding space has therefore two dimensions, its dimension is two, and this space is said to be two dimensional. Locating the exact position of an aircraft in flight requires another dimension hence the position of the aircraft can be rendered in a three-dimensional space (SuperStringTheory.com, 2007).

In the dimension of mathematics, there are fourteen dimensions including: length, height, width, space, time, light, units, breadth, electric energy, inductive dimension, metric spaces, magnetic energy, cardinality, and parallel universes (Wikipedia.com, 2007, SuperStringTheory.com, 2007). Theories such as String Theory and M-theory predict that space, in general, has ten or eleven dimensions, respectively (Wikipedia.com, 2007). The universe, when measured along these additional dimensions, is subatomic in size. As a result, we perceive only the three spatial dimensions that have macroscopic size. Humans can only perceive up to the third dimension while humans have only the knowledge of travel through the fourth. They cannot, however, see anything past the fourth (SuperStringTheory.com, 2007).

Cognitive skills are any mental skills that are used in the process of acquiring knowledge. These skills include reasoning, perception, and intuition. Kiel, (1999). describes the importance of cognitive skills in acquiring literacy skills:

Reading and writing rely on a specific set of cognitive skills such as attention, memory, symbolic thinking, and self-regulation. As children learn to read and write, they continue to improve these skills, making them more purposeful and deliberate. Deliberate attention is required to differentiate between letters, even if they look alike, and to isolate specific portions of a word for encoding or decoding it. Children must remember the previous words as they decode the subsequent words in a sentence. If they do not make a purposeful attempt to remember, they cannot extract what the sentence means. Writing and reading are the use of symbols and if children cannot think symbolically, they cannot learn to manipulate letters and words. Finally, self-regulation must be in place so that children can monitor their own understanding of the print so they can abandon ineffective reading strategies and move on to more effective ones. (p.165)

Most often, cognitive skills are something that an individual was taught or some new information that an individual has gained. One can think about it or talk about it in their own words. People use cognitive skills whenever they try to understand or comprehend something. Cognitive skills are very important in everyday life. Without cognitive skills, children would fall behind because they would not be able to integrate new information as they are taught it. The sad truth is that most students move on to the next grade before they have appropriately mastered the basic academic skills like reading, writing, and math. Because the students have not fully developed their cognitive skills, the ability to learn and make sense of new information is crucial to successful learning (Sternberg, 2003). This is why developing cognitive skills is so important.

Critical thinking is one's ability to create logical conclusions based on reasoning to more complex definitions which take into consideration a person's emotions, personal feelings, and cultural biases. According to the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, "critical thinking is a broader term describing reasoning in an open-ended manner, with an unlimited number of solutions" (Erwin, 2000, p. 11). Critical thinking requires that the thinker improve the quality of their thinking by skillfully taking charge of the very structures of thought and by imposing intellectual standards upon them (Emory University, 2003). The structures of critical thinking include cognitive skills, emotion, personal feelings, judgment, argument, and logic (2000). Emotion and personal feelings are often referred to as barriers to critical thinking. Emotional influences have the ability to "bury, twist, and fragment the thinking process" (Kirby & Goodpaster, 2002, p. 30). However, these same emotions and feelings are a necessary part of the critical thinking process. "Feeling without thinking is often cold and sterile" (Sternberg,