This qualitative study investigates the ability of adult low-skilled readers to talk about the thought processes and phonetic strategies they use to make decisions about their spelling. Four adult learners, all exhibiting word knowledge at a second-grade level or below, participated in individual 45-minute audiotaped interviews. Selected portions…

Interviews university students in modern physics about their understanding of three fundamental experiments. Explores their development of models of microscopic processes. Uses interactive demonstrations to probe student understanding of modern physics experiments in two high school physics classes. Analyzes the nature of students' models and the…

Traditionally, Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) has focused on instructional methods to decrease extraneous cognitive load so that available cognitive resources can be fully devoted to learning. This article strengthens the cognitive base of CLT by linking cognitive processes to the processes used by biological evolution. The article discusses recent…

The literature on metacognition suggests that having students practice metacognitive monitoring consistently should lead to significant improvement over time. In this study, students practiced metacognitive monitoring through the course of a full semester. The authors then examined changes in monitoring accuracy, judgment bias, and their…

Recent evidence suggests a close functional relationship between memory formation in the hippocampus and dopaminergic neuromodulation originating in the ventral tegmental area and medial substantia nigra of the midbrain. Here we report midbrain activation in two functional MRI studies of visual memory in healthy young adults. In the first study,…

Discussion boards have the unique capacity to support higher-order constructivist learning and the development of a learning community, This chapter provides ten conditions that support the effective use of an online discussion.

This paper covers an experiment designed to investigate the relationship between the didactical setting and learning effects with animations. We investigated whether the cognitive load imposed by animations could be reduced when the students could control the flow of the animation. We did not find an effect due to the fact that the students did…

Academic advisors help students with the process of decision making, of making sense of their world, of understanding how they go about learning, and of understanding how to appreciate diversity in their world. If advisors are to help students in these areas, academic advisors should be aware of the cognitive processes of how they make sense of…

Since Selinker's (1972) historic invocation of language learning strategies (LLS) and communication strategies (CS) as two distinct processes involved in the development of interlanguage, it has become customary in SLA literature to distinguish the strategies of learning from the strategies of communication. It has been argued in this article that…

Design is at the heart of vocational training programmes. That is the reason why teaching design and training students to design are major concerns of engineering schools. Our participation in this training favours a particular approach: reflexive practice. The Reflexive pedagogy lays the emphasis on the metaphorical dimension of learning. It is…

Noting that students fail to fully realize the advantages of notetaking as a process to develop a personalized learning system, this paper proposes the use of visual constructions to help students re-establish for themselves the unity of knowledge and to create personalized meanings to this knowledge. The paper summarizes the benefits of…

A conditions-based approach to the development of microlevel organizational strategies for instruction is explored. The conditions model reflects the idea that differences in learning tasks, primarily qualitative differences in the cognitive processing required of different learning tasks, can suggest different ways by which instruction can either…

Describes a highly effective reading program that focuses on learning strategies and the thinking process. (RB)

Aiming to show that improved learning can take place when children use self-monitoring and evaluation skills, this study represents a relatively new approach toward helping children "learn to learn." Among 60 second grade students, two questions were explored: (1) Is it possible that with proper training young children who ordinarily do…

The purpose of this paper is to describe a framework in which thinking skills instruction and other needed instructional emphases can be integrated into a unified whole. Discussion focuses on John Anderson's unitary model of cognition (1983), learning-to-learn, the nature of traditional curriculum content, thinking skills such as storage and…