Describes a study that examined the necessity for prerequest bibliographic verification for interlibrary loans by identifying request error patterns and critical bibliographic elements. The discussion analyzes the effectiveness of a modified verification process, in which the interlibrary loan technician decides which requests to verify, in terms…

Analysis of the discourse of eight- and nine-year-old children with emotional disturbances as compared with that of non-emotionally disturbed peers found significant differences between the groups. The analysis focused on mean length of utterances and discourse error patterns. (MSE)

Theories--based on concretizing, assimilation, and structuring--of the use of metaphors in learning are assessed. Each is shown to predict different patterns of inferences and errors in problem solving. An experiment with 43 undergraduates involving college lectures indicated that structuring may provide the most important function of metaphors in…

Argues that the internal organization of collection development and the nature of science and scholarship lead to inevitable gaps in collection development. The structural and intellectual causes of collection development gaps are analyzed, and a number of areas whose literatures are especially vulnerable to being ignored or overlooked by…

Certain misunderstandings in science, mathematics, and computer programing reflect analogous underlying difficulties. These misunderstandings are examined through four knowledge levels: (1) content; (2) problem-solving; (3) epistemic; and (4) inquiry. Analysis of several examples shows that misunderstandings have causes at multiple levels, and…

Describes the authors' error-frequency research, relating how they collected 19,615 teacher-marked student papers from the 1980s, analyzed them, and determined the major patterns of formal and mechanical error in current student writing. (SR)

This report includes data on the cognitive and affective behavior of college students who were given the tasks of interpreting and formulating Boolean search statements. Two versions of written point-of-use instructions on Boolean searching, affectively elaborated and unelaborated, were given to investigate comprehension, self-confidence, and…

Offers sufficient responses to 60 of the most frequently made errors in German grammar, plus 13 punctuation rules, and proposes that the instructor hand out this list to the students and henceforth "tag" language errors by the corresponding number, then have the student correct them and resubmit the assignment for a better grade. (GLR)

Guidelines for effective ecological assessment are put forth in the form of a list of diagnostic questions and a checklist of variables in the child's environment that may be contributing to behavior problems. Physical, psychosocial, and physiological factors are listed for consideration in analyzing the totality of influences on the child. (PB)

Two experiments were performed on the ability of children and adults to understand and produce locative verbs. Results confirm that children tend to make syntactic errors with sentences containing "fill" and "empty," encoding the content argument as direct object. (33 references) (JL)

A nine-step model is presented for diagnosing and correcting computation errors in arithmetic. The model, which lends itself to curriculum-based assessment and instruction, involves such steps as identifying error patterns, interviewing the student, and selecting the appropriate corrective strategy. (JDD)

Presents longitudinal case studies of the successive phonological acquisition of two Cantonese-English bilingual children, aged 2;3 to 3;1 years and 2;9 to 3; and 5 years. Children were assessed at four-week intervals. Phoneme-acquisition data and phonological process data revealed that both children had separate phonological systems for the two…

Two experiments examined phonological priming in children and adults using a cross-modal picture-word interference task. Pictures of familiar objects were presented on a computer screen, while interfering words were presented over headphones. Results indicate that priming effects reach a peak during a time when articulatory information is being…

Examined word retrieval in 14- to 24-month-olds. Found that children with limited productive vocabularies were less likely to produce labels of hidden objects than children with larger vocabularies, even though all could name them and did well when asked to find them. Pictorial cues facilitated word retrieval. Naming errors peaked among children…

Discussion of the multilingual mind's organization proposes the Least Expansion Hypothesis, that knowledge of any language is organized in the same cognitive manner. A slot is created for knowledge of each level of language, storing knowledge of all languages pertaining to that level. A new knowledge unit is entered only when differing…