Discusses what is meant by meaningful learning, the conditions necessary for meaningful learning to occur, the importance of vocabulary instruction to comprehension, and how to insure that vocabulary instruction is meaningful. (HOD)

Presents the results of two studies where children were taught to identify textual cues, syntactic and semantic, in order to locate main ideas. The children also built graphic representations of these structures and were taught relevant questions to ask regarding comprehension. Results showed significant improvement, especially with older…

Describes a long-term project where middle school students were taught to visually represent key text ideas through idea-mapping techniques. Instruction was inserted in the content area curriculum along with regular textbooks and supplementary material. Positive effects were found in recall, comprehension, and learning. (MJP)