The curriculum guide for Alberta's nine-year French language program, which spans grades 4 through 12, includes the following components: a set of objectives reflecting the province's goals of basic education and a rationale to support the inclusion of French in a school program; specification of minimum expectations for each language skill…

Typical characteristics of impulsive children and adolescents are reviewed and strategies for changing this behavior are considered. Self-instruction training requires the child to verbalize a given problem, alternative approaches to resolution, and attentional strategies. Language becomes a mediator for self-monitoring and regulation. Cognitive…

During the period 1984-1986, over 30 teachers from the Yorkshire (England) region have worked in collaboration with the Children's Learning in Science Project (CLIS) developing and testing teaching schemes in the areas of energy, particle theory, and plant nutrition. The project is based upon the constructivist approach to teaching. This guide…

This discussion of the relationship between self-directed learning, adult development, and distance education presents findings from researchers in the field of autonomous learning. In addition, the implications of self-directed learning for the curriculum and teaching methods in distance education are considered. The document is divided into the…

The Corrective Feedback Paradigm (CFP), a computer-based instruction model, addresses the problem of inefficient sequencing of items in a set to be learned by suggesting the use of an increasing ratio review schedule for presenting drill items. With this system, items answered correctly are either removed from the list entirely or replaced at the…

This practical guide on foreign language learning presents concrete suggestions on how to become a more effective and successful language learner. Suitable for use by both students and teachers, the book, divided into three parts, discusses language and language learning, learning strategies, and learner aids. Part 1 discusses the language learner…

Two studies designed to establish classification procedures and the reliability of a learning strategy screening procedure were conducted, using 184 third and 173 fourth graders from a middle-class suburban school district as subjects. A 10-minute learning strategy screening was administered during which subjects reported which of six generic…

This paper contends that efforts at educational reform must focus, above all, on the instructional encounter between teachers and students. The argument is presented in triadic sequence: three basic assumptions about learning, three interrelated models of the instructional process, and three practical approaches to promoting cognitive achievement.…

This paper examines problems involved in designing an integrated system to teach and assess critical thinking skills in the classroom, and describes the Monitor Achievement in Pittsburgh (MAP) Critical Thinking Project, an attempt to draw upon research from diverse disciplines in developing an effective pilot project in the Pittsburgh public…

This module (part of a series of 24 modules) is on the impact of interaction among students in a learning situation on achievement, cognitive development, and social development. The genesis of these materials is in the 10 "clusters of capabilities," outlined in the paper, "A Common Body of Practice for Teachers: The Challenge of…

Two experiments examined the cognitive resources used by readers in sentence modeling (summarizing the propositions in a sentence) as a function of reader task and of sentence complexity. It was predicted that encoding a sentence into memory for later recall would require more cognitive resources than reading a text to answer immediate questions,…

Recent studies of reading and writing instruction suggest that literacy instruction is easily distorted, incorporating measures of achievement that do not reflect students' mastery of the process of understanding, reading materials that are ill-structured and divorced from any real communicative intent, and exercises in subskill learning that…

The aim of this study was to investigate the strategies leading to test item responses in 60 young (20-25 years) and 60 middle-aged (35-40 years) adults, whose highest level of education had been either secondary, technical or university. Subjects were individually administered a 12 item test similar to Raven's Progressive Matrices, and were…

By identifying speculations concerning cognitive abilities and cognition's relation to culture, this paper outlines some of the work surrounding basic writers and speaking-writing relationships. Beginning with a discussion of the differences between speaking and writing popularized by Mina Shaughnessy, the paper goes on to examine studies that…

The manual designed to accompany an orientation seminar for students concerning language learning processes and strategies and the design of their program includes materials for five sessions, in three sections. The first section covers language learning and acquisition in general and contains a survey of the participants' foreign language…