Maintains that metaphors may be used to help secondary students understand the figurative language often encountered in social studies. Shows how labels were attached to real dominos which were then tipped over to explain the "domino effect," a theory often referred to in foreign affairs. This experience was related to "event chains" which were…

This article reviews literature on kinetic structure, a low-inference variable related to lesson organization. Kinetic structure significantly affects student achievement and student perception of lesson effectiveness. Training programs to increase kinetic structure and other results concerning structure are discussed. (Author/MT)

Methods by which structural models correct for the effects of attenuation due to measurement error are reviewed, and implications of such disattenuation for interpreting the results of structural equation models are considered. Recommendations are made for improving the practice of disattenuation, and caution is urged in drawing inferences based…

Solving the school dropout problem requires accurate data about the actual rates and counts for all student groups residing in the community. This article discusses ways to improve demographic accounting accuracy. Reporting only dropout rates diverts attention from dropout counts and increases the likelihood of making incorrect demographic…

Investigates effects of prior knowledge on learning from high- and low-coherence history texts. Examines participants' comprehension in two experiments. Finds high-knowledge readers performed better on open-ended questions after reading low-coherence text. Indicates that low-coherence text requires more inference processes--these inferences are…

Investigated young children's ability to use narrative contexts to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary terms. Two groups of 15 7-and 8-year-olds participated; children with normally developing reading comprehension skills and children with weak reading comprehension skill. Results are discussed. (Author/VWL)

Summarizes Tarski's semantic truth theory to clarify different aspects of implication. Extends the classical definition of implication as a relationship between propositions to a relationship between open sentences with at least one free variable. Analyzes two problematic situations and the presentation of some experimental results from research…

A theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, latent semantic analysis (LSA), is presented to explain how people know as much as they do with the little information they get. LSA suggests that some domains of knowledge contain vast numbers of weak intercorrelations that amplify learning by inference. (SLD)

Describes the role and function of the census and discusses census taking and decision making about "counting" from two perspectives: the Supreme Court decision in Wisconsin vs New York, and the Census Bureau's current plans for the year 2000. Concluding comments explore the lessons learned from the 1990 census and the effect on the 2000…

Examined effects of training in sequencing pairs of visual stimuli on subsequent six-stimuli or five overlapping two-stimuli sequencing. Subjects were 3- and 4-year-olds. Found that few succeeded with untrained two- and six-stimulus sequences derivable from the two-stimulus training, but when given training on only the overlapping sequences,…

Discusses techniques English-as-a-Foreign-Language learners can use to learn words in context. Highlights using structural clues, inference clues, and guessing. (Author/VWL)

Investigated the role of "nonlogical" perceptual cues to differential absolute size in the transitive inferences of 6- and 7-year-olds. Found that both age groups showed identical overall premise memory, but the younger group tended to reason more on the basis of perceptual information rather than on successfully encoded premise…

Studied the diversity effect, that people draw stronger inferences from a diverse set of evidence than from a more homogeneous set of evidence, in children. Results from 4 experiments involving 305 elementary school students in England show robust sensitivity to diversity in children as young as 5 years. Discusses findings in relation to…

A theory of classical conditioning is presented, which is based on a parallel, rule-based performance system integrated with mechanisms for inductive learning. A major inferential heuristic incorporated into the theory involves "unusualness," which is focused on novel cues. The theory is implemented via computer simulation. (TJH)

It is shown that Bayesian algorithms are computationally simpler in frequency formats than in the probability formats used in previous research. Analysis of several thousand solutions to Bayesian problems showed that when information was presented in frequency formats, statistically naive participants derived up to 50% of inferences by Bayesian…