Argues that, like making stew, there is more than one sequential writing process, and that while one cannot discern the process by examining the product, the product (or purpose) cannot help but shape the processes. (HTH)

Describes a cognitive-skills approach to teaching physics, Spanish, and philosophy. The approach relies on students verbalizing their thinking as they solve problems. (IRT)

Sequenced writing assignments--a series of related writing tasks--offer students frequent opportunities to write and to acquire writing skills through redundancy, progressively more complicated cognitive and rhetorical demands, and a diversity of learning activities. The most frequently identified goal of sequencing is to move students beyond…

This study investigates the effects of content sequence on student learning. The treatments, a spatial and conceptual instructional sequence each consisting of identical content elements, were administered to students in a two-year college Botany course. Hypotheses tested were that sequence would have an effect on student perceptions of the…

An examination of student papers from three universities on the same tasks revealed that expository writing tasks were less demanding cognitively than argumentative writing tasks and that argumentative writing tasks were less demanding than speculative tasks. Another finding was that when students were able to translate a generalized task into…

The experiments reviewed in this paper give strong reasons for concluding that the order in which things are learned, the range of exemplification of structural principles, and the introduction of a carefully judged amount of conflict may be critical to reaching an appropriate kind and level of learning. (Author/SJL)

Many basic skills are chains of cognitive operations. For teaching such skills, two questions have not been adequately investigated: (1) how the operations comprising the skill should be sequenced, and (2) the relationships among the operations that need to be taught. This investigation entailed four studies on different types and lengths of basic…

The study of the performance of 55 learning-disabled college students on the Raven's Progressive Matrices and other tasks found: (1) a negative correlation between visual-motor skills and written language, (2) a positive correlation between visual organization/memory and mathematics, and (3) a positive correlation between auditory memory and…

Recent research has shown that when individuals hear an impoverished, atypical, or disorganized story and are asked to recall it, they can and do produce a canonical version of it. To determine if this "strategic" manipulation of story structure undergoes developmental changes, two experiments were conducted using second and sixth grade children…

The implicit assumption behind personal writing assignments given at the beginning of a writing course is that personal essays eliminate the writing apprehension of having nothing to say. However, college freshmen find it very difficult to write about themselves and their own opinions because this writing involves abstract mental processes and…