The importance of learning styles to student retention and career decision guidance is considered. Learning style is the way people process information and solve problems. Research on right and left brain processing, which indicates that the left hemisphere controls thoughts that are predominately rational and the right hemisphere controls…

Fourteen studies were reviewed whose findings indicate that learner control of certain presentation characteristics interacts with certain learner characteristics. Thus, learner control is not a panacea for accomodating individual differences. Instead, some kinds of individual differences probably should be taken into account by teachers and…

The increase in adult college students who have been away from formal education for several years and who are seeking degrees to match the status level they have achieved in business requires a specially organized composition course. Two strategies will keep the course organization and content professional, yet meet individual students' needs in…

Reading is comprehension, it is a complex network of interrelated skills, and it involves several levels of thinking, but in a holistic rather than in a molecular response to the text. The practice of reading based on this theoretical understanding involves identifying levels of comprehension; noting that levels of comprehending are not strictly…

RELATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF MECHANICAL TEACHING MACHINES AND PROGRAMED TEXTBOOKS AS TEACHING DEVICES, AND THE EFFECT OF GRADE LEVEL ON LEARNING BY MEANS OF THESE AUTOMATED TEACHING METHODS WERE INVESTIGATED. THE EFFECTIVE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE MECHANICAL, WRITE-IN TEACHING MACHINE AND THE PROGRAMED TEXT IS THAT CHEATING IS LESS LIKELY TO OCCUR WITH…

This paper presents an overview of the philosophy, psychology of learning, teaching methods, and curriculum of the Waldorf Schools. Most Waldorf teachers are influenced by the esoteric form of critical idealism propounded by Rudolf Steiner. The child is considered by Steiner to be a spiritual being who has reincarnated on to earth in a physical…

The two-phase study compared two methods of adapting self-instructional materials to individual differences among learners. The methods were compared with each other and with a control condition involving only minimal adaptation. The first adaptation procedure was based on subjects' performances on a learning task in Phase I of the study; the…

The framework presented in this paper uses an organizational perspective to describe and compare alternative approaches to teacher education. Alternatives in teacher education such as competency-based teacher education, humanistic education, or programs typified by academic-oriented, liberal arts teacher education are discussed from the viewpoint…

Three design strategies for selecting number of instructional instances needed in concept learning were investigated. Two strategies used adaptive procedures for the selection, while a nonadaptive strategy selected instances by number of associated attributes. The data analysis showed that the full adaptive strategy (using pretask and on-task…

This paper describes an experimental course in which the author taught students to improve their learning skills. It is a first step toward constructing a systematic body of knowledge about learning strategies. The course covered four topics, chosen because they were complex enough to require several weeks to make progress, but simple enough that…

An investigation was made to determine the instructional function of the professional media staff in a school. The objectives of the study were: (1) to develop a model to add the expertise of the media specialist to the teaching team; (2) to access the effect the model had on the academic achievement and self-concept of students; and (3) to…

Comprehension levels necessary to the acquisition and retention of facts, concepts, and rules and the facilitating effects of the use of orienting directions and postadjunct questions were investigated in a study involving 105 sixth-grade students. Four treatment groups each received a version of a six-page fictional passage, differing in the use…

This paper argues that the "back to basics" movement represents a simplistic assessment of the problem it is trying to deal with. It is not necessary for the English curriculum to "return" to narrowly defined basic skills because the English curriculum, in fact, never left them, and that is the real problem. Language…