Earning a college degree offers many benefits but requires time and money. Prior learning assessment (PLA) saves time and money by translating prior learning into college credit. This systematic literature review examined peer reviewed journal articles about PLA from the last decade. The research design used systematic literature review procedures…

This study reviewed dropout research in online learning, particularly focusing on nontraditional students and examined what progress has been made since Garrison's 1987 review. This study categorized factors identified from literature into student characteristics, student prior skills, external factors, and internal factors, all of which are based…

The learner's existing schema, which is defined here as an integrated structure of knowledge about a given topic, plays a critical role in new learning. Prior to or during learning, appropriate schemata should be activated in order to produce the best learning results. Instructional designers should systematically assess their target audience's…

Noting that researchers in the fields of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, and linguistics are taking a constructivist view of reading comprehension, this paper undertakes a comparison of that view with views concerning comprehension that have been expressed at the Claremont Reading Conferences over the past 50 years. The first…

This review of the research on aptitude-treatment interaction (ATI) discusses four methods or assumptions that might explain why ATI research has not generated the anticipated empirical support: (1) the lack of a theoretical base; (2) disagreement over what a given aptitude means and how it should be measured; (3) difficulties in defining…

How background knowledge of the content of a text affects reading comprehension and the role it plays in the diagnosis and instruction of reading comprehension skills for linguistically/culturally diverse (L/CD) students may be demonstrated through schema theory. Since a schema represents what is believed to be generally true about a class of…

The concept of knowledge gap (the discrepancy in the amount of information acquired by different groups of people reached by mass communication) can be critically examined to consider its theoretical and practical implications in the context of using communication to bring about changes in society. Some causes of knowledge gap include differences…

This conference presentation describes how students develop the cognitive processes through which they acquire knowledge from their classroom experiences. The data were taken from five studies of individual students' classroom experience and its relationship to the learning of curriculum content in typical science and social studies units in the…

Two unresolved issues in first language and second language research on the role of background knowledge in comprehension are discussed: (1) the theoretical distinction between "content" and "formal" schemata and their interrelationship in texts and (2) the relationship of effects measured in cross-cultural research to background knowledge that…

Recent studies refuting the effectiveness of advance organizers in preparing students to comprehend text material have not met the conditions necessary for advance organizers to succeed. According to the assimilation theory, which holds that people learn by chaining what is known to what is to be learned, the following conditions must be met for…

The hypothesis for this study assumed that subjects who received a diagram representing the structural relationships of a story would be more likely to solve a new and analogous problem than subjects who received two analogs without a diagram. The 151 graduate students who acted as subjects were randomly assigned to one of four treatments: one or…

This article reviews the literature of hypermedia research. Several perceived problems are identified, including: irrelevant assessment of outcome variables; weak methodological design in conducting experimental research; lack of theoretical foundations in designing hypertext systems; lack of specification of precise learning outcomes; and lack of…

Designed to explore what is being done to help learning disabled (LD) readers develop comprehension skills, this paper reviews research in teaching reading comprehension to LD students and develops generalizations from the research to guide reading comprehension instruction for such students. The 10 generalizations presented and discussed in the…

A functional typology of verbal instructional tasks for advanced classroom instruction and inservice training is described and illustrated in this paper. The described typology is based upon functional definitions of elementary and conceptual behavior and incorporates the kinds of goals and objectives that surveys and research have shown to be…

This paper reviews several studies on aptitude treatment interaction, the interaction between the learners' individual differences and methods of instruction. Specifically, it investigates the relationship between previous knowledge, including previously held misconceptions, and instructional methods. It is suggested that significant interactions…