Describes a study which examines "introducer forms" used by English as a second language learners to initiate picture descriptions. Results suggest that students receiving formal second language instruction process the input data in ways which are more "acquisition-like" and often not consistent with what the teacher intends…

Explores the role of memory in mediating mass communication effects. Examines (1) the nature of memory, (2) issues in retention and recall of media messages, (3) methods of promoting retention and recall of media messages, and (4) implications of memory processes for mass media effects. (PD)

Describes SPAWN, a technique for helping teachers make writing assignments in which students must first read, then integrate information from reading with their background experiences, to produce a piece of writing. (FL)

Indicates that certain items in reading comprehension tests are not measuring for hearing impaired students the particular reading skill they are intended to measure. Argues for a word/idea association strategy as the explanation for this and briefly discusses its relevance for testing and educating the hearing impaired. (FL)

Describes a classroom project for middle school students where developmental theory was translated into instruction promoting cognitive development. (MD)

Employs a well-developed information-processing task to assess the nature of the representation and activitation of letters and geometrical figures and the changes that occur with reading development. (FL)

When the introductory philosophy course evokes cognitive dissonance over philsophical problems in which students are already interested, it can help develop students' skills in reasoning and assessing arguments. This kind of course should play a key role in the undergraduate curriculum. (MSE)

Discusses impact of three selected command language facilities (positional or free text operations, crossfile searching, term frequency analysis--ZOOM) on the man-system interface in relation to operational online information retrieval (IR). A cognitive IR model, searchers' knowledge structures, and searching with different types of command…

Investigated women's (N=35) aptitude for and changes in skills during an engineering training program and the relationship between academic/demographic information and cognitive skills to success in the program. Compares results with those of studies of male undergraduates. Includes results of mathematics anxiety and conservation of horizontality…

Determined if differences in performance on a posttest (in which sections differed in use of manipulative models to answer questions) were attributable to differences in reasoning levels of chemistry students (N=105). Results indicate that reasoning may affect performance under conditions of constant instruction. (JN)

Investigates the development of children's metacognitive knowledge about reading, its relationship to reading performance, and the influence of using two different interviewing techniques for eliciting information about reading. (FL)

Suggests that self-reported story climax imagery is related to deeper levels of processing on reading comprehension measures that do not rely disproportionately on verbal reasoning processes. (AEA)

Discusses how children's knowledge can be measured/described, knowledge patterns across diverse concepts, interaction of knowledge/learning, and ways children construct more advanced problem-solving rules to replace less adequate ones. Evidence, drawn from studies on children's acquisition of knowledge about balance beams, suggests that knowledge…

The National Institute of Education has supported new research and synthesized existing information to provide teachers and administrators with direction for cognitive instruction. Efforts have been made to identify kinds of thinking and learning conducive to success in particular subjects and to offer useful research-based ideas to teachers. (TE)

Concludes that on an immediate recall test, fourth-grade students taught with a graphic organizer strategy for facilitating comprehension recalled significantly more idea units in a test passage than did students who had not received such instruction, but there were no performance differences between the two groups on a one-month delayed recall…