Eye tracking methodology offers insights into human attention, decision-making processes, and user behaviours. In the context of teacher learning, data generated from eye-tracking technology has the potential to provide important information about teachers' behavioural patterns and cognitive processes that may or may not be occurring during…

The driving forces behind mathematics learning trajectories is the need to understand how children actually learn and make sense of mathematics--how they progress from prior knowledge, through intermediate understandings, to the mathematics target understandings--and how to use these insights to improve instruction and student learning. In this…

This report reviews and synthesizes psychological and educational research on learning strategies. The report contains an overview of strategy modification; a review of factors influencing strategy selection and use (including intellectual aptitude, personality variables, cognitive style, reception preference, motivation, sex, and prior…

This report examines the process of learning large complex subject matters, by asking about the ways in which teachers and students communicate the necessary knowledge structures to each other and how a student comes to select an appropriate paradigm for solving a problem and revising inappropriate solutions. Protocols from several different…

When one learns complex material, the important thing appears to be the ability to understand the material. Once understanding occurs, learning and remembering follow automatically. The conventional psychological literature says little about the processes involved in the learning of complex material--material that takes weeks, months, and even…

One of the most typical ways in which people learn is by inferring general rules from examples. In recent years, significant progress has been made toward understanding how learning from examples can occur, determining when it does occur, and identifying conditions that promote it. This paper reviews these results and then suggests a program of…

This study examined the effects of overt illustration on first graders' learning from oral prose. In all experiments, children heard prose selections, after (or during) which they illustrated selection content with plasticized figure cutouts and background scenes. Control subjects copied or colored geometric forms during the illustration period.…

The relationship between selective attention and learning is investigated in this paper. It is proposed that two forms of attention exist: (1) inspectional attention, which is a simple matching pocess where perceived stimuli are compared with an internal model of the stimulus for which the individual is searching, and (2) comprehensional…

Presented is a theoretical, hierarchical model of abstraction designed to provide a systematic theoretical framework for future research into abstract learning. A test of the model with 149 subjects supported the assumption that the hierarchical model of abstraction is valid. (SL)

Implications of research into human ability and metacognition for adaptive instruction are examined. Traditionally, adaptive instruction has largely involved the adaptation of instruction to suit the cognitive idiosyncrasies of individual learners. Through the development of learning strategies and metacognitive abilities to manage them, this…

The relationship between retention of story propositions and inferences was studied in two experiments on groups of children who averaged five and eight years in age. In the first experiment, the motives and theme of protagonists were varied and found to affect the number and kind of inferences made by eight-year-olds. The increase in the number…

This summary of a program of research in children's learning describes the effects of pictures and visual imagery on children's cognitive performance. The role of individual differences is highlighted throughout the paper, as are variables which potentially limit the effects discussed. Some of the conclusions were that in a large number of…

Investigated was the relationship between proportional thinking and students' ability to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of concepts related to simple machines, structure of matter, and equivalent fractions. The study involved a random sample of 136 ninth-grade physical science students. Each student's proportional reasoning skills were…

Reports on a study of four Australian 11th-grade biology students that used stimulated recall to evaluate student thinking processes.The study confirmed the complexity of the teaching-learning process. (MD)

Different kinds of basic knowledge and strategies necessary for comprehension are examined in three radically different domains: (1) the stories, (2) mathematical problems, and (3) electronic circuits. From analyzing the comprehension processes in these different domains, similarities have emerged in the role of planning knowledge and the…