To investigate teachers' beliefs about critical-thinking (CT) activities for different populations of learners, the Critical Thinking Belief Appraisal (CTBA) was administered to 145 practicing secondary teachers. Teachers rated both high-CT and low-CT activities as more effective for highadvantage learners than low-advantage ones, demonstrating strong “advantage effects.” They also rated high-CT activities as more effective than low-CT ones for both high-advantage and lowadvantage learners, demonstrating “pedagogical-preference effects” stronger for high-advantage learners than low-advantage ones. Although these results are inconsistent with the assertion that teachers favor low-CT activities over high-CT ones for low-advantage learners, the results suggest that low-advantage learners may receive fewer high-CT activities in schools, which may hinder their academic performance. Studies of the development of teachers' CT-related beliefs are needed, with the goal of establishing teacher-education practices emphasizing appropriate use of high-CT activities for low-advantage learners.

In a number of domains, humans adopt a strategy of systematically reducing and minimizing a codified system of movement. One particularly interesting case is "marking" in dance, wherein the dancer performs an attenuated version of the choreography during rehearsal. This is ostensibly to save the dancer's physical energy, but a number of considerations suggest that it may serve a cognitive function as well. In this study, we tested this embodied-cognitive-load hypothesis by manipulating whether dancers rehearsed by marking or by dancing "full out" and found that performance was superior in the dancers who had marked. This finding indicates that marking confers cognitive benefits during the rehearsal process, and it raises questions regarding the cognitive functions of other movement-reduction systems, such as whispering, gesturing, and subvocalizing. In addition, it has implications for a variety of topics in cognitive science, including embodied cognition and the nascent fields of dance and music cognition.

This paper describes new approaches to assessment in dance and dance education. The rst part examines assumptions behind traditional models of evaluation in academic and performing arts contexts. I consider whether it is useful to understand human ability as unitary or if it is meaningful to evaluate people according to a single dimension of competence, such as a general intelligence or a unique talent. I argue that pluralistic models of human intelligent performance-and 'intelligence-fair' assessments-more accurately portray the richness, multidimensionality, and diversity in human behaviour. The second part uses this theoretical meta-structure to de ne key requirements for multidimensional assessment. Recent approaches to assessment in dance are considered in light

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