Comparison of policies and practices in six countries focused on the concept of access to education as flexibility: systematic structural arrangements such as accreditation of prior learning, open and distance learning, and information/communications technologies. Successful international experiences have implications for Scotland and other…

Examined reasoning in normal, autistic, and deaf individuals. Found that deaf individuals who grow up in hearing homes without fluent signers show selective impairments in theory of mind similar to those of autistic individuals. Results suggest that conversational differences in the language children hear accounts for distinctive patterns of…

Two experiments examined how 5- and 10-year-olds revised their category representations when exposed to exemplars that were congruent or incongruent with existing knowledge. Findings indicated that judgments about feature co-occurrent within the learned category were influenced by both stereotypical beliefs and exemplar observation. Stereotypical…

A study presented four groups of chess players (child experts and novices, adult experts and novices) with short-term memory tasks involving meaningful and random chess positions, as well as a control board composed of geometric-shaped spaces and pieces. Found that child experts' immediate recall for meaningful chess positions was far superior to…

The differences among elaborative-interrogation, reading-to-understand, and no-exposure control conditions with familiar domain material in contrast to unfamiliar domain material were studied for 50 Canadian and 50 west German undergraduates. Results provide evidence of effects of both elaborative interrogation and prior knowledge on learning.…

Compares the practice of assessing prior learning in the United States and Britain and reviews major issues: nature of the evidence, collection of evidence into portfolios, evaluation, and costs. (SK)

Describes an experiment that evaluated features of TEXNET abstracting software, compared the use of keywords and phrases that were automatically extracted, tested hypotheses about relations between abstractors' backgrounds and their reactions to abstracting assistance software, and obtained ideas for further features to be developed in TEXNET.…

In 2 experiments, 80 and 88 college students, respectively, used either imposed or spontaneous tactics for studying a descriptive prose passage. Imposed tactics were either outlining or relating passage information to prior knowledge. Spontaneous tactics were at least as effective as were tactics imposed via short-term training. (TJH)

A study determined if there would be any significant difference in comprehension from expository text between students instructed to use context clues and prior knowledge and those students not instructed in their use. It was hypothesized that students who only used a dictionary to understand words, not exploring context or prior knowledge, will…

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 study investigated whether computer science educational background makes secondary students more adept at using word processing capabilities, and compared computer science and non-computer science students' writing improvement with word processing use. Computer science students used more sophisticated program features but student writing did…

This paper attempts to compare the nativist approach on the contextualization of vocabulary with approaches by behaviorists, empiricists, and neofunctionalists. It considers such themes and issues as the following: cognition, comprehension, and communication; prior knowledge and content; the process of contextualization; the skill and process of…

Third grade children (n=24) who were administered the standard, simultaneous version of the Matching Familiar Figures test committed fewer errors when administered a sequential version of the same test than did subjects (n=24) who took the more difficult sequential version first. (PN)

Entry level and senior students given identical pharmacy law units were compared and effects of prior internship and externship experience assessed. Seniors' achievement gain was greater, but prior practical experience showed little effect on achievement. Retention was statistically significant for sophomores 9 to 12 months post-instruction, and…

Two studies investigated the effectiveness of the A-Priori reading intervention program, which uses pre-teaching in an effort to provide at-risk students (who qualify for the Chapter 1 program) with prior knowledge before the regular instruction on the same objectives and topics. In the first study, subjects were a control group of 207 students in…