A study involving 120 undergraduate students attending the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul (Minnesota) was undertaken to test the interactive effect of instructional strategy (structured versus constructed) with learner's prior domain knowledge in concept acquisition. Previous instructional design research on concept learning has focused on…

Noting that many prereading discussions lead teachers to "mis-estimate" students' prior knowledge about a particular topic, this paper describes the Pre-Reading Plan (PReP) designed to help both students and teachers become aware of what students already know about a specific topic. Following an introduction, the first portion of the…

Case studies of eight graduate students were designed to seek indirect evidence for the role of explicit and tacit knowledge in interpreting a series of reading selections. The general hypothesis was that formal schooling would be used in nonschool and postschool situations in the following ways: (1) replicative--a situation that elicits a school…

The effect of the amount of prior knowledge on the long-term retrieval of information is examined. In two studies, seventh and eighth grade students of average or above average reading ability learned passages to simulate materials from history textbooks (factual), from reading textbooks (narrative), and from science textbooks (conceptual).…

A study investigated the effect of relevant background knowledge on the reading comprehension of students of Spanish. Students with limited knowledge of baseball took a comprehension test on a Spanish-language report of a baseball game. Results indicate that background knowledge is possibly more important than language level for comprehension.…

Determined if there are certain propositions that physics students (N=31) share with respect to a topic, to what extent is a student's knowledge on a subject idiosyncratic, and if there are different groups of students whose members share distinctive sets of propositions. Results are reported and discussed. (DH)

Explores the ways in which writers actually use different forms of knowing to create prose. (FL)

Attainment of five earth science concepts by high school seniors depended on the amount of previous science coursework by the students and on the size of their school's enrollment. Seniors in Texas high schools were subjects of the study. (Author/PP)

This conference presentation describes how students develop the cognitive processes through which they acquire knowledge from their classroom experiences. The data were taken from five studies of individual students' classroom experience and its relationship to the learning of curriculum content in typical science and social studies units in the…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the roles of interest, knowledge, and learning strategies on recall within a specific subject domain at an early stage of learning. Students (n=17) at two levels in a postgraduate music therapy course were assessed for their levels of prior knowledge, interest, and the number of strategies they used to…

The science achievement scores of 1,284 adults on a test of science knowledge were regressed on three composite independent variables: motivation, and prior and current educative experiences. Early educative experience predicts current activities of motivation; all three factors contribute to the prediction of achievement. (Author/LC)

Results of a case study (one graduate physics tutor) demonstrate that a person's conceptions, which include metaphysical commitments, play a significant role in the way s/he understands complex subject matter such as Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. (Author/SK)

Presents findings on student myth belief and stereotyped opinion levels in the area of alcohol use from a study in two Massachusetts communities. Implications for awareness education are drawn from analysis of data on the effect of prior knowledge on students' opinions, which did not show stereotyped beliefs. (MF)

Focuses on the importance of background or schemata in learning to read and discusses how to help students use their background knowledge for reading. Suggests teachers need to activate students' prior knowledge of a topic before they begin to read. (VWL)

Examined how object shape, taxonomic relatedness, and prior lexical knowledge influenced children's overextensions (e.g., referring to pomegranates as apples). Researchers presented items that disentangled the three factors and used a novel comprehension task where children could indicate negative exemplars. Error patterns differed by task and by…