Describes a technique that can be used to construct variables from clinical interviews that can be used in quantitative analyses. The technique involves the representation of each proposition a student uses in terms of a standard set of underlying predicates, concepts, and relationships among concepts. (JN)

Based on research studies from fields of education, social organization, and logic, this article argues that the study of organization of knowledge has important implications for students' general intellectual development. Recurring stages of intellectual development are outlined, and implications for improving quality of library school education…

Compared the effectiveness of threat and benefit appeal approaches in presenting written nutrition information to adults (N=1500). Questionnaires mailed to respondents focused on items which measured the comparative influence of the approaches on changes in attitudes, behavior, and knowledge level. (JN)

This study explored and documented Taiwanese students' alternative conceptions of animal classification. We examined the understanding of the "animal", "vertebrate" and "invertebrate", "fish", "amphibian", "reptile", "bird", and "mammal" concepts among elementary,…

This field experiment begins to build a theoretical framework for exploring the effects of media characteristics on subjects' understanding and integration of information. Students in two eighth-grade science classes wrote term papers with one class using a print encyclopedia and the other an electronic encyclopedia to conduct their research. A…

A study in a remote, rural, mid-Atlantic school system assessed how teachers regarded the curriculum and their instructional needs; 226 personnel directly related to instructional services responded to the questionnaire, 42 were interviewed, and 72 were observed in classroom settings. Teachers generally rated themselves much more favorably than…

A study investigated the idea that the amount of knowledge viewers extract from exposure to television is a function of the amount of mental effort involved in processing the program content, and that the mental effort invested in viewing is partly a function of people's expectations about the demand characteristics associated with the content.…

With the use of verbal report strategies, a study was conducted to examine (1) the types of comprehension strategies readers use to process familiar and less familiar texts and (2) the differential use of think aloud strategies by average and below average readers. Subjects were 15 tenth grade male students in upstate New York. Two weeks prior to…

This field study examined learning effects attributable to instructional design characteristics when eighth-grade science students used a print encyclopedia or a videotex version of the encyclopedia to write term papers. Results suggest that specific effects of instructional design characteristics of a delivery system are of a limited nature. (MBR)

This study described ways in which two groups of urban, low-socioeconomic children remained the same and differed after a transition year in skills-based curriculum and a continuing year in whole language curriculum. Both groups had experienced whole language instruction in the first two years in kindergarten and first grade. This investigation…