By following their wonderful ideas or critical exploration, three eighth graders learned how to do traditional Chinese painting, which is taught by copying old masters' work from the Ming Dynasty in the 17th century. The standard manual, which most learners have been using for these three hundred years, is the "Mustard Seed Garden Manual of…

To foster medical students' diagnostic knowledge a case-based worked example approach was implemented in the context of a computer-based learning environment. Thirty medical students were randomly assigned to the condition "with erroneous examples", and 31 students learned with correct examples. Diagnostic knowledge was operationalised…

Author discusses the Independent Study Program underway at Essex County College, and provides his reasons for believing that the program is an indispensable one. (Author)

The Individually Guided Behavior (IGB) concept was designed to help autistic children and adolescents structure their time and increase independence in work skills activities. The approach is also designed to reduce specificity of performance output, helping the child or adolescent to rely on environmental rather than teacher initiated cues for…

Unanticipated obstacles and difficulties, endemic to industrial research in complex sociocultural settings, indicate that reliable conclusions concerning industrial life are problematic. Discussion of sampling biases reveals that error of unknown proportions is introduced into the research process: first, when decisions about whom to study are…

The University of Mid-America brings low-cost education to people in their homes through reliance on self-instruction packages and the mass media. (Author/IRT)

Analyzes the concept of self-directed learning, focusing on the facilitation of self-directed learning in the noninstitutional setting. Clarifies self-directed learning and follows with an outline and discussion of the ability of distance education to facilitate such learning. (CH)

Suggests that andragogical practice should acknowledge and accept of its learners both self-directedness and its obverse, dependency; both can be viewed as phenomenological expressions of a specific, context-bound, and limited situation. Compares andragogy and pedagogy. (JOW)

The author analyzes the meaning of self-direction, defends and refutes it as a distinguishing feature of adulthood as compared to childhood and youth, and assesses its significance for lifelong education and learning. (JOW)

A multiple baseline design was used to demonstrate the effectiveness of a self-instruction training sequence across three groups of three preschool handicapped students to improve their ability to count a requested number of objects from one to ten. Eight of nine students showed improved accuracy in counting objects and generalized these gains to…