A survey of 23 faculty active in the Adult Liberal Studies program examined faculty attitudes about older students in higher education. Faculty generally felt that adults have better skills and more cognitive skills than traditional students. Faculty also were pleased with the structure of the adult program. (CH)

Discusses five ways to determine the amount and quality of prior knowledge children bring to a topic: (1) free recall tasks, (2) word association tasks, (3) structured questions, (4) recognition tasks, and (5) unstructured discussion. (FL)

Describes New Jersey's alternate route to teacher certification, designed to attract good teachers with practical experience in such fields as vocational education. This provisional teacher program is composed of three phases: (1) certification, (2) placement, and (3) training. (CH)

Describes a study that investigated how young readers respond to text when a teacher uses an anticipation exercise within the framework of a small or large group discussion. The dynamics operating in classroom situations that use anticipation in small or large group contexts are observed and described. (FL)

Argues that the mystery surrounding comprehension development can be dispelled by an understanding of schema theory and linguistic theory and especially by an understanding of W. Kintsch's model of comprehension, which draws from those bodies of theory. Describes teaching methods based upon Kintsch's model. (FL)

The paper provides a college mathematics student's concept maps, definitions, and essays to support the thesis that language-based prior knowledge can influence students' cognitive processes of mathematical concepts. A group of intermediate algebra students who displayed terms mainly from the spoken language on the first and the second concept…

The impact of prior learning on new learning is highlighted by the case of Dean, a Year 8 student who developed his own method to find the sum of the interior angles of a polygon without knowing why his method worked. Enriched transcripts and visual displays of the cognitive, social (Dreyfus, Hershkowitz, & Schwarz, 2001) and affective elements…

Focusing on the composing process, this series of articles discusses improving composing by exploring personal experience and the use of computers and specific computer composition programs for teaching writing. (HTH)

Describes the method implemented at West Virginia University for evaluating and granting life experience credit to school administrators. (WD)

Develops a text-specific prior knowledge measure that predicts the likelihood of a student's success in recalling the content of a reading passage. (HOD)

Describes a teaching method that combines the concepts of the structural overview and concept attainment in order to help students read content area textbooks. (FL)

Describes two experiments that were conducted to determine the relative influence of text data and prior knowledge on the kinds of inferences children make when answering questions about stories. (HOD)

Supports the function of analogy in activating specific background knowledge and generally related knowledge in reading unfamiliar text, a view consistent with emerging schema theoretic notions. (AEA)

Experiences in prior learning programs are discussed by three adult learners. The College of New Rochelle's Life Experience Portfolio Program, Marylhurst Education Center's Prior Learning Program, and Ohio University's Prior Learning Program are summarized. (MLW)

Results of this investigation indicate that the possession of high prior knowledge concerning the topic read greatly aided comprehension of that topic. (HOD)