Reports a study that examined changes in heterosexual college students' concerns and fears about AIDS and homophobia between 1985 and 1992. Repeated surveys indicated that students' AIDS knowledge and personal worry about HIV infection increased. There were no changes in homophobia. Interest in AIDS education increased, then leveled off.…

A community-based, case-control study conducted in rural Nigeria with 132 pregnant girls and 131 nonpregnant girls the same age found that pregnancy was largely associated with the completion of formal education at an early age and the lack of knowledge of reproductive health. (SLD)

This survey of 53 students (ages 13-15) at a Leeds (England) secondary school found confusion between mental and physical handicap, confusion between mental handicap and mental illness, and confusion about causes of mental retardation. Most students felt that persons with mental handicap belonged in the community. (JDD)

Illustrated vignettes, some containing an ambiguous reference to the illustration, were presented to kindergartners and second and fourth graders. Variations in presentation tested the effects of question sequence, of delay between ambiguous reference and interrogation, and of the complication of the illustration on children's ability to detect…

In a study of beliefs and construction of knowledge, undergraduate and graduate education students responded to open- ended statements and a list of similes describing what teachers, students, and classrooms were like. Results suggests that the simile list responses were valid reflections of the subjects' personal metaphors. (32 references)…

This study investigated the effects of culture-specific background knowledge and inferences upon second-language readers' comprehension of text. Ten Korean adult second-language readers were asked to think aloud as they read a short story from another culture and then answer a detailed set of postreading questions. (20 references) (VWL)

Why children under 10 years do not use their mathematics knowledge to build a shortcut strategy to solve inversion problems was studied with 88 elementary school students in Munich (Germany). Most could use the shortcut but did so only when it did not compete with a more familiar strategy. (SLD)

Interviews with 30 Ontario (Canada) elementary teachers revealed that teachers were aware of many characteristics of gifted, learning-disabled (LD), and gifted LD children and were aware of similarities in cognitive and creative abilities in gifted and gifted LD children. They were less aware of creative thinking characteristics of LD children.…

It is argued that there are only three core instructional models (behavior, development, and apprenticeship) and that within the framework of these models, only five types of knowledge can be acquired: (1) declarative; (2) procedural; (3) conceptual; (4) analogical; and (5) logical. Examples are presented. (SLD)

Teacher rankings were collected from 16 elementary teachers for 28 students with communication disorders and 28 nondisabled students who had the same achievement/ability indices. Results indicated that teachers trained in a collaborative model of service delivery were more accurate in their perceptions of ability levels for students with…

New methods for representing the structural properties of domain-specific knowledge were studied. Network representations of data from 40 college students' ratings of the relatedness of domain concepts were derived using the Pathfinder scaling algorithm, and similarity between students' and instructor's networks was then assessed using a…

The role of analogical mapping in the formation of conceptual misrepresentations was studied by analyzing target-domain inferences generated by 193 third graders learning from an analogy. Explicit knowledge of the instructional goal decreased the number of conflicting inferences. Implications for learning are discussed. (SLD)

The concept of metacognition is discussed, with a review of attempts at definition. A. Brown's (1987) four historical roots of metacognition--verbal reports as data, executive control, self-regulation, and other-regulation--are summarized. Influence from the developmental theory of L. S. Vygotsky (1978) may result in a clearer conceptualization of…

To test whether cognitive interest in a topic is affected by how much the reader knows about the topic, 36 undergraduate students read a text, gave a rating for cognitive interest, and answered 2 recall measures. Associations among knowledge, cognitive interest, and text recall are discussed for their implications for learning. (SLD)

Three gifted and three learning-disabled gifted students (ages 13-15) viewed themselves on videotape solving mathematical problems and responded to questions pertaining to their problem-solving strategies. The non-learning-disabled students applied substantially more cognitive and metacognitive knowledge to the problem-solving task. (Author/DB)