The purpose of this paper is to review the relevant evidence concerning the relationship between knowledge and its effect on learning, with an end to answering the questions: (1) How important is knowledge to learning? and (2) How does the relative importance of knowledge change with development? The paper is divided into three main sections:…

In reviewing current literature on the importance of examples in the process of teaching learning, this report takes into particular consideration textbook approaches that emphasize the role of examples for comprehension and motivation. Utilizing a constructive theory of prose comprehension, it then attempts to specify the function of examples in…

Two studies examined how the factors of content-relevant knowledge and text organization influence students' abilities to study and to remember text information. The first experiment examined the effect of prior content knowledge on students' ability to identify important information in the text. Forty 7th- and forty 11th-grade students, experts…

A study was conducted to determine the benefits of an approach to teaching inferential skills that combined an explicit attempt to sensitize children to why and how one should draw inferences to prior knowledge with substantial practice in drawing such inferences during story discussions. Subjects were 20 good and 20 poor fourth grade readers who…

Part of a research project designed to develop a theory of the cognitive processes involved in skilled reading by the analysis of the location and duration of eye fixations, this paper concentrates on how eye fixations can be used to determine when encoding, lexical access, parsing, and integration processes are executed and how they are affected…

Directed reading activities found in commercially produced instructional materials usually contain information that is aimed at helping children understand the story as well as helping them to develop other skills. To test the effectiveness of both establishing background knowledge and directing children toward central story content, two…

Describes a schema-theoretic view of how analogies enhance students' prior knowledge; reviews some of the recent studies using analogies to assist students' comprehension of science text; and illustrates the use of an analogical study guide in biology. (HOD)

Examines how English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students choose a prompt from several options on a timed-writing exam. Researchers interviewed 26 students after observing them taking a writing exam. Findings indicate that students' background knowledge, question type, and topic specificity influence their decision and that time is not an…

Investigates the procedural understanding of first-year university science students in South Africa. Explores ideas related to the reliability of experimental data and discusses the types of reasoning underlying the responses. (DDR)

Videotaped observations were made of seventh and eleventh grade students using an instructional hypermedia system. Three profiles of hypermedia navigation emerged with each style characterized by distinct information processing strategies. Analysis of the characteristics of learners revealed that students within each profile group had similar…

Evaluated the PREG conceptual model of human question asking. Found the model was sufficient as it accounted for nearly all of the questions produced by students, and was discriminating in that it could identify the conditions in which particular classes of questions are or are not generated. (Author/SD)

The two purposes of this study were: (1) to determine the extent to which previous knowledge, on-going motivation and current social support influence performance in a college introductory statistics courses; and (2) to identify the thought processes used in statistics learning by students who preform well and perform well and poorly,…

The role of prior knowledge in skill acquisition is to enable the learner to detect and to correct errors. Computational mechanisms that carry out these two functions are implemented in a simulation model which represents prior knowledge in "constraints". The model learns symbolic skills in mathematics and science by noticing and…

A study described the social interactions of ability-grouped dyads as they construct knowledge of the scientific concept of balance to elucidate the relationship between interactions and conceptual growth. The verbal and nonverbal behaviors of 30 fifth-grade students were recorded as they completed three activities related to balance and levers.…

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…