Patterns of cautiousness in a prose learning task were examined in three age groups of adults representing three levels of educational experience. Types of instruction, order of material presentation, sex, and educational experience level were varied for all groups of the 90 adults participating in the study. The main findings were as follows: (1)…

An analysis and model of the cognitive processes underlying complex learning situations are presented. A theory is proposed that attempts to specify particular internal knowledge structures generated and modified during instruction, and to use them to explain specific difficulties that the learner experiences and also the overall progress being…

Considerable attention has been devoted in recent years to theories of text comprehension and recall that stress the importance of preexisting knowledge structures or schemata. While the valuable contribution such research has made to the understanding of the reading process and the various disabilities that often attend its acquisition must be…

Confirms that able readers have a more well-rounded sense of story structure than disabled readers. Specifically, that able readers demonstrated an ability to tell more elaborate stories than disabled readers. (FL)

Describes research done to determine whether there is a statistical relationship between an English as a second language learner's ability to determine a word's morphemes or structural units and his/her ability to comprehend written English text. (SED)

Describes SPAWN, a technique for helping teachers make writing assignments in which students must first read, then integrate information from reading with their background experiences, to produce a piece of writing. (FL)

Provides a way to introduce students to the philosophical roots of psychology by surveying their assumptions on the nature of mind, emotions, and behavior. Describes and gives examples of a 50-item Likert-scale questionnaire concerning positions of the philosophers, biologists, and psychologists discussed in the class. (MJP)

Administration of the Test of Understanding in College Economics to 79 British college freshmen before and after a required introductory economics course revealed that students with little prior exposure to economics typically did not achieve the knowledge level of more experienced students by course end. Results were not affected by intelligence,…

Results for 78 college students who took a pretest on basketball knowledge, read a passage on basketball, and took an immediate or delayed posttest indicate that pretest scores are significantly related to immediate posttest scores, whereas delayed posttest scores are related to Scholastic Aptitude Test verbal scores. (SLD)

Studies of the relationship between students' propositional knowledge (as measured by concept mapping tasks) and their study strategies (as measured by self-report questionnaires) for electricity in first-year university courses are described. The effect of propositional knowledge and prior knowledge on both conceptual knowledge and study…

Four studies examined developmental differences in the representation of basic-subordinate inclusion relationships in three-, five-, and seven-year olds and undergraduates. Found that even three-year olds showed rudimentary knowledge of the asymmetry of inclusion. There was a marked developmental gap between producing subordinate category names…

Introduces the growing body of research on development of scientific reasoning skills, focusing on reasoning and problem-solving strategies used in experimentation and evidence evaluation. Maintains that current research examines strategy development and use in moderately complex domains to examine conditions under which subjects' theories…

This article reports on an exploratory investigation of the relationship between prior experience of formal instrumental music tuition (FIMT) and the process of collaborative computer-based music composition. The study linked a school in the UK with a school in Norway to engage in computer-mediated collaborative composition via e-mail.…

A study analyzed the prior knowledge state of two university populations: students at the Open University (OU) of the Netherlands and students at the University of Limburg (UL). Analysis of the prior knowledge state was based on an extensive analysis of the literature in relation to theories, models, and practice-based strategies about the…

Various researchers have associated meaningful problem solving with methods guided directly by a conceptual knowledge base. By contast, a meaningless solving course, or sequence of operations, is essentially independent of the solver's conceptual understanding of the problem under consideration. This paper is the first to document a meaningless,…