In keeping with the trend toward active, participative learning, observation projects for speech communication students can allow them to experiment with designing and carrying out a study of human communication. Students can be encouraged to look at the dynamics of a church congregation, a courtroom, a pre-game football huddle, or an office, and…

Three studies were conducted to test the effectiveness of reciprocal teaching as a means of instructing seventh grade poor readers about activities they could use to increase comprehension and to ascertain that their comprehension was proceeding smoothly (comprehension monitoring). Reciprocal teaching involves having teacher and students take…

While listening comprehension is perhaps the most ignored area of the language arts, a review of the literature suggests that it is deserving of more classroom instructional time. Involving the simultaneous orchestration of skills in phonology, syntax, semantics, and knowledge of text structure, listening comprehension seems to be controlled by…

A study was conducted to investigate parental belief systems and parental childrearing practices relative to the intellectual development of their communication-handicapped preschool children. Consideration was given to the context of family size and ordinal position of the communication-handicapped child. A total of 60 two-parent families with…

This pamphlet discusses student learning styles and teachers' adaptability to those styles. Section 1 discusses "What Are Learning Styles" by talking generally about cognitive, affective, and physiological aspects of those styles. Section 2's topic is "What Determines Learning Style?". "The Relationship Between Learning Styles and Teaching Styles"…

Intended to help upper elementary and secondary school teachers increase their students' critical thinking, this booklet discusses the theory and techniques behind the use of questioning to evoke prior knowledge and further inquiry. The first portion of the booklet discusses the theory and research that underlie the use of questioning, examining…

A study was conducted to examine learning from textbook sentences that provide examples. It was predicted that an example written succinctly and with a word order that emphasized its parallel semantic relations with the exemplified principle, such as "animals have parasites; dogs have fleas," would have a positive effect on idea comprehension. It…

Perspectives of the field of psycholinguistics and second language research are examined to provide a broader understanding of language learning and language behavior. Psycholinguistics, which uses the approaches of psychology and linguistics is defined as the search for an understanding of how humans comprehend and produce language. Based on the…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 27 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) job satisfaction as related to individual functional dominance and job description functional dominance; (2) familiarity as a variable in anticipated…

This document contains 58 papers, all of which focus on the psychology of mathematics education. The papers were organized under five general themes: (1) teaching and learning mathematics (17 papers), (2) investigations of mathematical thinking (17 papers), (3) mathematical procedures (12 papers), (4) processes and strategies in the mathematics…

Using an effort toward comprehension paradigm developed by P. M. Auble, J. J. Franks, and S. A. Soraci, Jr. (1979), the worry component of state test anxiety was related to long-term memory for sentence encoding conditions that involved comprehension, but low effort (embedded-cue) and comprehension-high effort (post-cue). A noncomprehension…

A study examined prereaders' story processing strategies by assessing their performance on tasks that tapped their ability to (1) use story grammar and role playing, (2) retell a wordless picture book, (3) read a predictable book, (4) retell an oral story, (5) sequence pictured story events, and (6) fingerpoint-read a nursery rhyme. Parent…

The concept of multiplication is described and illustrated using several different representational systems. A conceptual approach to teaching mathematics is compared with the procedural approach commonly found in the school curriculum. Four different methods of representing the multiplication process with numbers larger than ten are presented:…

Intended to help professionals remain knowledgeable about current research in reading and to serve as a relatively accessible bibliographic source of research on a specific topic, this annual report summarizes approximately 1,150 reports of reading research identified between July 1, 1983, and June 30, 1984. The summaries are arranged into six…

The Conceptual Learning and Development (CLD) Model suggests four successive levels of concept learning: (1) concrete--recognizing an object which has been encountered previously; (2) identity--recognizing a known object when it appears in a different spatial, time, or sensory perspective; (3) classificatory--generalizing that two items are alike…