In this article, we report a study in which we asked 137 parents and caregivers to evaluate a year-long family literacy program in which they participated. Parents valued the insights they gained about children's learning in general and literacy development in particular. They reported that they learned from each other as well as from the program…

Noted educator Carol Ann Tomlinson shares the insights that shaped her thinking about informative assessment. Informative assessment goes beyond tests and the grade book. It means assessing students both formally and informally in multiple ways and giving frequent, productive feedback on student work. Informative assessment isn't separate from…

When lecturing, teachers make use of both verbal and nonverbal communication. What is called teaching, therefore, involves not only the words and sentences a teacher utters and writes on the board during a lesson, but also all the hands/arms gestures, body movements, and facial expressions a teacher "performs" in the classroom. All of these…

This study introduces a new computer-based methodology, "concgramming", that has as its primary aim the automatic identification of the phraseological profile and hence the "aboutness", of a text or corpus. It is argued that this methodology can be employed by language learners and teachers to raise awareness of the importance of the…

Those who focus on the study of visual information continue to search for effective ways to conceptualize that inquiry. However, many visual examples are better categorized as visual/verbal collaboration, complicating analysis. When analysis is based on the assumption that visual and verbal modalities perform in similar ways, important…

To determine if patterns of listening and reading skill development in mildly handicapped children differed markedly from those of non-handicapped children, 180 learning disabled (LD), educable mentally retarded (EMR), and nonhandicapped (NH) children from rural and urban settings were given the Durell Listening-Reading Series. A multivariate…

Concludes that subjects' scores on simultaneously presented tasks were significantly higher than on sequentially presented tasks for both intra- and cross-sensory modalities, suggesting that the ability to integrate sensory information across learning modalities is important in reading acquisition. (RB)

Modality research is of major importance to the field of reading; it has directed attention to three factors: intersensory transfer, intersensory perceptual shifting, and modal preference. This paper provides a critical review of the most pertinent research relating each of these factors to reading achievement. No attempt is made to review studies…

Most teachers can respond to differences in student learning styles. Eighteen elements of learning style, categorized as environmental, emotional, sociological, and physical are described. (Author/MLF)

The philosophy of mainstreaming all students must include the teacher's understanding of the nature of the student's learning problem. The teacher needs specific suggestions concerning alternative methods from which each individual can profit. (Author/MLF)

One hundred eighty-eight congenitally deaf high school students were given sentence comprehension tests in order to determine which if any of four possible hypotheses--developmental lag, the method of sentence presentation, teaching methodology and acquisitional modality--explained the observed syntactic deficit in the deaf language user. (PHR)

Two experiments examined preschoolers' visual and verbal coding processes in a pictorial short-term memory task. Results of both experiments indicated that high visual similarity had a deleterious effect on recall accuracy regardless of the verbal codability of the stimuli. (Author/JMB)

The relationships among retention performance, organizing strategy preference, and grade point average were assessed in 227 college students, with the resulting correlation coefficients suggesting that the type of organizing strategy used in memorizing exerts a strong influence on the recall of paired associates over both short and long periods of…

This study tested the assimilation of an auditory-visual stimulus configuration in 32 infants aged 15 to 16 weeks. The infants' discrimination of matched and mismatched auditory-visual stimuli indicated that infants by 4 months of age are capable of constructing bimodal schemata. (JMB)