The author compares two philosophies of language instruction (medical and behavioral models); evaluates four major elements of the teaching/learning process (stimulus, pupil response, consequation, and feedback); as critical variables in developing a lesson plan; and discusses the effects of selection of pupils, teachers and space on language…

Although the nation's two-year college movement has been largely successful in providing higher education to a broad range of people, new barriers are emerging to the performance of this function. The problem is evident in the fact that increasing numbers of students neither enter nor leave the educational system with the competencies necessary…

On the basis of evidence from general linguistic theory and psycholinguistic research, it is argued that the working hypotheses of the audiolingual habit theory are inconsistent with studies of human verbal learning tasks, and that transformation grammarians have shown convincingly that structuralist views of language are too narrow in scope. It…

Functional communication emphasizes the uses that communication serves in everyday interaction and places particular importance on the context in which the functions are performed. A practical means for integrating functional communication instruction into adult education environments is the learning community method. Learning community students…

It has been 25 years since the publication of J. B. Carroll's (1963) seminal work on the model of school learning (MSL) and its subsequent identification by B. S. Bloom (1968) as the theoretical basis underlying mastery learning. Carroll's model of school learning is a theoretical formulation asserting that the degree of learning attained on a…

A study investigated the effects of the motivational variables of attribution and self-efficacy on the continued use of successfully learned strategies which promote independent learning from text. The subjects consisted of 11 freshmen and sophomore students participating in a two-week workshop on learning strategies which included a study project…

The paper disucsses the need for training in critical thinking and the effects of debate training across the curriculum as a teaching tool and learning mechanism. The debate training provided through the Oral Communication Program at Virginia's Radford University is described (design, implementation, results), along with data from a report on the…

It is becoming increasingly important to teach students higher-order thinking skills in addition to mere factual knowledge. Recent scientific and technological advances offer significant opportunities to implement more effective teaching of these skills. By investigating intellectual processes, cognitive science has led to a significantly better…

A collection of seven essays about current topics involving social studies curriculum is presented in this document. "Priorities in the Social Studies" considers curriculum-related issues and social problems that need to be addressed. "The Student and the Psychology of Learning" suggests criteria that should be considered by teachers when…

The article discusses the use of the Structure of Intellect (SOI) model as a basis for developing thinking abilities in a variety of curriculum areas: (1) the integration of subject matter areas and SOI operations; (2) thematic lessons that sequence specific cells of the SOI model; (3) directed teaching lessons to develop student awareness of…

The Teacher Education and Learning to Teach Study of the National Center for Research on Teacher Education combines case studies of teacher education programs with longitudinal studies of teacher learning. In this paper, the development of the theoretical framework on which instrumentation for the longitudinal study is based is discussed.…

The William Perry model of learning is directly parallel to what has been learned about writing processes. He observed that the student is essentially a dualist who sees everything as right or wrong. This stance of absolute acceptance wavers when the student encounters varieties of or disagreements among truths, thus gradually evolving into the…

The double-entry journal requires students to write affective response statements to literature readings and to compare such entries with those of classmates. Use of the double-entry journal is intended to activate students' prior learning and present feelings, foster collaborative learning, integrate major language skills, and encourage the…

Drawing from basic assumptions about learning and critical thinking skills, this paper suggests a teaching method for helping community college students to use their critical thinking capacity in their college courses. First, a series of assumptions commonly held by teachers about the nature of learning are presented, and contrasted with…

Research on adult learning shows that there is no decline in ability to learn as people get older, that except for minor considerations such as hearing and vision loss, the age of the adult learner is not a major factor in language acquisition, and that the context in which adults learn is the major influence on their ability to acquire a new…