It has been alleged that few American students can use their knowledge effectively in thinking and reasoning. This study urges teachers to give more attention to student abilities in analyzing, classifying, comparing, formulating hypotheses, and drawing conclusions--that is, thinking skills essential to reasoning processes. Designed to familiarize…

This curriculum helps high school students identify behavior that puts them at risk for injury by promoting the practice of safer behavior. It introduces students to some startling statistics and teaches vital knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors to improve students' personal safety behavior. Educators are encouraged to teach the curriculum via an…

This individualized inservice packet on interpretive comprehension in the content areas provides teachers with instructional guidelines and information relating to the development of interpretive comprehension skills. It is one of a nine-part series of booklets--Teaching Teen Reading--in self-instructional format intended as a practical resource…

The California Art Education Association conducted a portfolio assessment pilot project to provide visual arts educators with examples of classroom practice to serve as a foundation for further development of performance/portfolio assessment. Key issues addressed during this project included the purposes of assessment portfolios for students and…

This paper describes a strategy that was developed to help elementary school students to become more interested, involved, and accepted in school. The strategy involved a pen pal project in which students wrote to other students at an elementary school who were in other classes and at different grade levels. The idea was presented as a fun…

When designing a program to improve the critical thinking skills of students, it is important to identify the specific learning outcomes for which to strive. In addition, the instructor must determine why students are not currently exhibiting the kind of critical thinking skills desired in order to develop the appropriate techniques and methods to…

Researchers of computer ability have been largely influenced by the Galtonian perspective of intelligence assessment: a predominantly linear, construct-driven model based on identifying statistically determined factors. The use of this methodology, though, has far more to do with utility than theoretical rigor. Notably absent from this kind of…

This study investigated the cognitive benefits of learning how to program by determining the degree of cognitive transfer of programming skills at a construct level to solving analogous problems in other domains. Subjects, who were students enrolled in four sections of the beginning Pascal programming course and two sections of a calculus course,…

Two studies on cognitive performance in mentally retarded children are reported. In the first study, the Bayley Scales of Infant Development were administered to 56 mentally retarded children, aged 2 to 6, to determine the possibility of discerning subsets of items that form a developmental pattern of interrelated subscales, using the SCAMMO scale…

Research on second language learning has shown that several myths about how children learn languages exist. Among these mistaken ideas are that: (1) children learn second languages quickly and easily; (2) the younger the child, the more skilled he will become in acquiring a second language; (3) the more time students spend in a second language…

The case study of a 5-year-old Taiwanese child, newly arrived in the United States with no English skills, focuses on the effect that parent and teacher expectations have on the child's acquisition of English literacy skills. Data were gathered in home and classroom visits, in formal and semi-structured interviews, and from samples of the child's…

If teacher education is to train second language teachers to be principled practitioners, it is essential to resist the attraction of panaceas and recipe-type solutions to instructional problems, and to promote teachers' better understanding of what constitutes successful language learning. Second language acquisition (SLA) research, both applied…

Three learning modules are described and investigated as they reflect different students' conceptions of and approaches to learning. The Schoolwork Module (SWM) focuses on task performance and involves a passive, incremental, piecemeal, and rote memory method of learning, parallel to what might be implied by the Information Processing model of…

This book, stressing safety and prevention of accidents, is designed for children and adults to read together. Each chapter uses a Stop, Think, Act, and Remember (S.T.A.R.) formula to guide children through common situations that require first aid skills. Each first aid topic begins by presenting one or more problem situations that are solved by…

This study reports the development of 25 post-baccalaureate students who participated in a longitudinal study of college students' epistemological development. experiences into the process of knowing. The study interviewed students to evaluate how they arrived at contextual knowing through experiential learning experiences. The experiences…