The critical examination of society's circumstances, institutions, and cultural predispositions and values can help detect problems and injustices and can suggest opportunities for improvement. Neo-Marxist critical theorists of the Frankfurt school are committed to work of this kind, but their perspective is informed by Marxian precepts, and their…

Beyond the first several thousand most commonly used words in a language, direct vocabulary instruction is not efficient. Use of inferential skills then becomes the most effective way of learning new vocabulary; it is the way native speakers build their 60,000 word vocabularies. Because the skill is not automatically transferable, it must be…

A study compared text-connecting inferencing and text integration skills of hearing-impaired (HI) students who had surpassed the documented fourth-grade plateau in reading comprehension with those who had not. These groups were also compared to skilled and less-skilled normal-hearing (NH) fourth graders. Subjects read a four-page narrative and…

A study assessed the level of workers' knowledge of their pension plan's provisions related to early and normal retirement. The data used were from the 1983 Survey of Consumer Finances. The survey, which was based on a nationwide sample of more than 3,800 households and more than 1,000 public and private pension plans that covered them, asked the…

Introductory statistics texts give extensive coverage to two-sided inferences in hypothesis testing, interval estimation, and one-sided hypothesis tests. Very few discuss the possibility of one-sided interval estimation at all. Even fewer do so in any detail. Two of the business statistics texts we reviewed mentioned the possibility of dividing…

Children in kindergarten, first, second, and third grades heard scenarios in which a child experienced an emotionally equivocal or unequivocal event. Subjects were asked questions which assessed their ability to discriminate between equivocal and unequivocal situations. Two follow-up studies were conducted. Implications for children's social…

Variance stabilizing transformations yield statistics whose standard errors are only influenced by the number of observations on which they are based. A solution that can be extended to inference on all of these parameters is presented and illustrated via three examples. (TJH)

Describes a community college project which incorporates literature into course content outside the English department to enhance students' ability to respond to subject matter and develop critical thinking skills. (NH)

In two experiments, the importance of mnemonic illustrations for improving the learning and memory performance of learning disabled adolescents was studied. Results showed that students learned more when they studied passages with mnemonic pictures and that mnemonic instruction facilitated students ability to make inferences about information…

The goal of this unified theory of human reasoning is to specify what constitutes reasoning and to characterize the psychological distinction between inductive and deductive reasoning. The theory views reasoning as the controlled and mediated application of three processes (encoding, comparison and selective combination) to inferential rules. (JAZ)

Describes students' work during a 12-week course on fantasy offered to talented and gifted high school students. Illustrates how the students learned about metaphor and inference. (SRT)

Investigates, using eight scenarios, children making inferences about memory from incomplete knowledge and children varying in what they judge as relevant information in their schema. Showed that older children are less likely than younger ones to invoke an inferential schema when making memory judgements. (Author/BB)

Investigates several variables' effects on children's inferential processes, including cause of target event, presence and timing of questions prior to recall, and inference type that the questions demanded. Children four and seven differed in logical, constrained, and unconstrained inference production; causal connections between story events…

Young and older nursery school children were taken to three locations in their school and asked to point to five targets on the school grounds. Older children were more accurate than younger children, but children's spatial representations were relatively nonintegrated at both age levels. Consistent sex differences in favor of males were found.…

Argues that making inferences is an integral part of reading comprehension. Presents classroom strategies based on current research that encourage inference skill development. (FL)