Using 33 college freshmen enrolled in a basic reading skills course as subjects, a study was conducted for two purposes: (1) to determine the effects of direct exposure to the topics of the selections in the New Jersey College Basic Skills Placement Test (NJCBSPT) on their posttest scores, and (2) to investigate whether students exposed to the…

A program is described that set out to improve/enlarge the reading background of entering students by asking them to read 5-10 specific books before coming to college, featuring one book each year as the "common text," and providing a number of special seminars and activities based on that text. (MLW)

This report compares the provision of vocational education and training (VET) in Australia, Germany and the United Kingdom. It finds that training policies are increasingly based on similar general principles which promote the improvement and reform of vocational education and training, although the implementation of these principles tends to…

Describes a study of elementary and secondary school library media specialists in Oklahoma that compared current knowledge of policy to actual practice regarding off-air videotape recording for use in classrooms. Discussion focuses on strong versus weak educational justification and situational vignettes depicting each. Media specialists'…

Describes a 1995 study of college freshmen at a Scottish university that examined use of computers, knowledge about information technology, and reasons for not studying computing. Gender differences are discussed and results are compared with earlier studies from 1992, 1989, and 1986. (LRW)

This study examined comprehension in four groups of undergraduates under text only, multimedia, and two diagram conditions of text supplementation. Results indicated that effects of text supplementation are mediated by prior knowledge and learning style: multimedia appears more beneficial to surface learners with little prior knowledge and makes…

Explores the faculty time and effort spent in developing and delivering a graduate course for both a distance course and a traditional classroom course. Results show that the distance course did require more time, but suggests hypotheses for future comparative analysis that time may partially depend on instructor experience and institutional…

Describes an empirical study that investigated how well people in the information science field perform as judges of document relevance, topicality, and utility for information needs that they did not originate. Results are compared to the actual users' judgments, and the effects of experience and gender are explored. (Contains 17 references.)…

Compares a multimedia package for teaching about the phases of the moon to grade 8 (12-year-old) students with a conventional three-dimensional modeling approach. Results show both methods were equally effective in terms of student learning, for male and female students, and prior computer experience was not a factor in multimedia use. (Author/LRW)

One hundred thirty-seven students in 12th grade physics classes participated in a quasi-experimental study comparing the jigsaw classroom method of cooperative instruction with traditional direct instruction. While no differences were found between the two conditions for physics achievement gains, the results revealed differences in students'…

Although ample research has investigated critical-thinking skills among college students from state-supported higher education institutions of nonreligious affiliation, virtually none has examined critical thinking among students enrolled in private Christian colleges, nor the effect of prior educational setting on students' critical-thinking…

Noting that both the structural characteristics of television and the characteristics of the viewer may influence comprehension of television news, a study tested the hypothesis that the synchronous presentation of television news will maximize learning for viewers with low prior knowledge of program content. Synchronous and nonsynchronous…

With the use of verbal report strategies, a study was conducted to examine (1) the types of comprehension strategies readers use to process familiar and less familiar texts and (2) the differential use of think aloud strategies by average and below average readers. Subjects were 15 tenth grade male students in upstate New York. Two weeks prior to…

The effectiveness of three instructional approaches was investigated in a study of how best to facilitate vocabulary acquisition. The three approaches were (1) the cognitive approach, a method employing dictionary worksheets and patterned after the most commonly used method of teaching vocabulary; (2) the affective approach, which urged students…

Discusses a study of six senior English majors at the University of Houston, three of whom intended to be teachers and three who did not. Concludes that English teachers' prior experience as students has a crucial impact on the way they view teaching. (JC)