When interviewed, 105 third-grade students indicated that they did not view retardation as a set of behaviors, but as a trait, defined abstractly and perceived to be both predetermined and largely irreversible through personal effort. Children did not assume that being retarded excluded being pretty, athletic, or smart. (Author/JDD)

Focuses on the professional role of the teacher in the classroom in relation to the students being taught and the subject matter being learned. Defines and gives examples of three dimensions of the professional act of teaching: conceptual knowledge, general knowledge, and interpersonal communication and social skills. (JHZ)

Describes six strategies for teaching vocabulary: exclusion brainstorming, knowledge rating, connect two, semantic feature analysis and semantic gradients, concept ladder, and predict-o-gram. (HOD)

Schema Theory, the use of the learner's background knowledge for the building of new knowledge, is applied to improving reading comprehension skills and teaching vocabulary words and concepts to learning disabled students. Semantic mapping is a vocbulary strategy which produces the interaction between prior knowledge in a graphic form. For…

Discusses the frequent misconception displayed by students that chromosome structure is a function of chromosome number or ploidy. Provides detailed analyses of the evidence concerning the prevalence of this ploidy/structure misconception among students of introductory genetics and the potential sources for inaccurate communication that it can…

Student knowledge in a subject area prior to and after instruction has traditionally been assessed by administering a pre- and post-test, usually multiple choice, though recent studies criticize the use of even the best-constructed multiple choice tests. This study assessed college freshmen's knowledge before and after a laboratory experience in…

Students in a college introductory statistics class were evaluated with conceptual and computational tests and the relationship between their levels of knowledge on the two forms of testing was assessed. There were significant correlations between their abilities to perform computations and to answer more conceptual questions on individual tests…

Fifty-three elementary school children were tested on Incidental Science Knowledge, i.e., knowledge acquired by chance outside school, and the results obtained were correlated with intellectual development and cognitive style as measured by interviews and group testing, respectively. Indicates that cognitive style and misconception play a…

This manual identifies characteristics of instructional tools that are effective and efficient in promoting cognitive access for a broad diversity of students, especially those with learning disabilities. An introductory chapter defines "instructional tools" and considers the importance of their design, their use in addressing student…

A study assessed the effectiveness of three cognitive levels of instruction with first graders--three-dimensional (3-D) instruction using real objects, two-dimensional (2-D) instruction using picture representations, and verbal instruction. The study population included 18 first-grade students between the ages of 6 and 8 at a small elementary city…

This book was written for practicing primary (elementary) school teachers and for anyone concerned with inservice or preservice science teacher education. The overall purpose of the book is to identify ways in which ideas about electricity and simple circuits can be taught effectively in primary school classrooms. This book is based on in-depth…