This paper describes a model for the adolescent's understanding of the motion of objects, and the application of this model to the design of beginning physics instruction in mechanics. Students' difficulties in learning classical Newtonian mechanics are described and integrated into current cognitive science research. Research findings on physics…

Reflecting the interdisciplinary emphasis that reading comprehension has received during the past decade, the articles in this volume deal with both the processes involved in reading and the instructional practices used in teaching it. The six articles devoted to reading processes deal specifically with the following topics: schemata,…

Describing cognitive science as a new discipline based upon the integration of elements of psychology, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and education, this paper argues that such a discipline has important implications for the field of communication. Following an overview of the literature of cognitive science, the paper offers an…

The extent to which cuing strategies and basic skills explanations of early reading constitute complementary approaches was examined in a study involving 94 fourth grade students. Basic skills--a unidimensional component based on measures of vocabulary development, language skills, and work-study skills--proved to be a powerful variable mediating…

In three experiments subjects (college and high school students) read passages which described psychological principles and answered either adjunct application or factual questions while reading. Questions were presented either before, after, or both before and after the parts of the passage that answered the questions. Subsequently subjects took…

In order to determine the effect of certain types of pictures on reading comprehension in beginning French, a study was conducted in which six types of pictorial contexts were used as advanced organizers for a test passage. One group of university students was given a text in French, a second group the same text in English, and a third group a set…

A procedure called the Group Mapping Activity has been used to provide for dynamic interaction of students through discussion after reading and to gauge the extent of readers' interactions with text. In using the procedure, however, it was discovered that some students regularly shifted the protagonists in their mapping. A study was undertaken to…

A study was conducted to determine whether children in revising their writing to accommodate new information would make corresponding textual changes to preserve appropriate focus and cohesion. The subjects, 48 children each from grades three, six, and nine, were presented with a task that involved descriptions of pictures with incongruent…

A PROTOTYPIC GUIDE TO READING SKILL DEVELOPMENT IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL FOCUSES ON THE COGNITIVE SKILLS THAT INFLUENCE ACHIEVEMENT IN READING. THE GUIDE PROVIDES EXPLICIT STATEMENTS OF THE FOLLOWING SKILLS -- WORD RECOGNITION, COMPREHENSION, STUDY SKILLS, SELF-DIRECTED READING, INTERPRETIVE READING, AND CREATIVE READING--AND A SPECIFIC FRAMEWORK…

TO DETERMINE THE RANGE OF COGNITIVE OBJECTIVES IMPLICIT IN THE QUESTIONS ASKED BY STUDENT TEACHERS AND THEIR PUPILS IN HIGH SCHOOL SOCIAL STUDIES CLASSES, 44 CLASSES WERE OBSERVED ACCORDING TO THE TEACHER PUPIL QUESTION INVENTORY (TPQI) DEVELOPED BY THE INVESTIGATORS. THE TPQI REQUIRES A 30-MINUTE CLASSROOM OBSERVATION DIVIDED INTO ALTERNATING…

Undergraduate students using an imagery mnemonic mediating technique involving "keywords" to learn definitions of thirty unfamiliar words performed better on a 1-week delayed comprehension test, on at least half of the definitions, than those who read and copied definitions. Mnemonic mediating strategies worked better than nonmediating strategies…

Many instruments designed to assess reading comprehension reflect instructional tasks that have not clearly been shown to be a part of the process of comprehension. If the measurement instruments are to have construct validity, however, they must be created to reflect what we know about cognitive processing. Recent work in cognitive psychology has…

The classroom interaction model is a strategy to help both teachers and students with reading comprehension. It focuses on literary or informational work rather than on specific skills abstracted from the work or skills proposed by reading texts or curriculum guides. The interaction model indicates that interpretation, application, and…

To examine the use of factual and inferential questions as adjunct material in prose learning, a study was undertaken in which undergraduate introductory psychology students used different study strategies on a prose comprehension test consisting of an equal number of factual and inferential multiple-choice items. One-hundred twenty students were…

Comprehension is a process that occurs within the reader and is at least partially dependent on cohesion and coherence. The concept of cohesion is used to show how sentences which are structurally independent of one another may be linked together. Cohesion exists within a text and is not the same as coherence, which is something the reader…