This paper describes the third phase of a multi-year study that has been assessing professional knowledge and perceptions of beginning teacher education students. This phase of the study reports on responses to a questionnaire designed to compare student knowledge across cohorts and institutions. The data reported here are from a total of 291…

Preservice teachers enter formal studies of teaching with an array of personal history-based beliefs and about teaching, classrooms, and students. This report traces the interactions between preservice teachers' personal history-based lay knowledge and their decisions about the potential value of coursework-based principles of content area reading…

Use of metacognitive strategies, creative problem solving, and creative thinking techniques in intermediate grade writing instruction can promote students' thinking and creativity. Metacognitive strategies can help students attack the writing task in an orderly fashion. Answering specific questions for descriptive, expository, narrative, or…

The impact that financial education had on the financial behaviors of (a) the agency staff who were trained to deliver the program and (b) the low-income individuals who participated in the program was investigated. Specifically, the researchers examined the relationship between total number of financial education lessons completed, prior…

Case-based learning is one method that can be used to foster critical thinking and schema construction. Students need to be provided with problem solving lessons in meaningful learning contexts for critical thinking to take place. In order for schema construction to occur, a framework needs to be provided that helps readers to elaborate upon new…

This paper, a discussion of the use of written tests to assess second language proficiency and achievement, considers what constitutes a valid writing test task and addresses three questions: (1) To what extent is performance influenced by prior knowledge about the topic? (2) Does it make a difference how the writing task is specified on the test…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which problem analysis facilitated the subsequent processing of expository text, both for novices and a comparison group. A text on osmosis consisted of six-pages and was used as reading material. The ninth-grade students were considered novices because they were unfamiliar with the…

If students are able to relate what they learn in school to experiences they have outside the classroom, they will become better critical thinkers. This paper suggests a model for teachers to use in aiding such "transfer" of knowledge from the classroom to the student's past or future experiences. By maintaining a profile of the student's…

This study was designed to identify characteristics of college freshmen taking mathematics courses. Students enrolled in basic algebra courses at a regional campus of a large midwestern university participated in the study. Students were administered an instrument which included a "math autobiography," the Adult Mathematics Expectation Scale…

In response to recommendations by a National Institute of Education (NIE) planning group to the effect that NIE should support efforts to understand the cognitive processes involved in acquiring basic reading skills and in comprehending linguistic messages, this book summarizes what has been learned about reading comprehension in the decade since…

British students in four age groups--4 to 5, 7 to 8, 11 to 12, and 15 to 16 years old--were observed in their classrooms in order to explore the relationships among the learner, knowledge, and thinking, and the role that writing plays in what is learned. In the infant classroom, writing was quite visible in the form of labels, questions,…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) creativity as a mediating variable in inferential reading comprehension; (2) teacher questioning and student response interaction during portions of reading…

A study was conducted to determine whether students who mapped prior and post knowledge of a basal reading lesson would achieve higher scores on a comprehension test and write better summaries of those stories than would students who received traditional basal reading instruction. Subjects, 30 fifth grade students, participated in either a…

Using examples from children drawing in a year one classroom, this article examines firstly, how drawing operates as a unique mental tool, and secondly, the role of drawing in the construction and development of knowledge. Young children utilize prior knowledge and experience to negotiate and construct meaning through their interactions with…

Taking students out into the field to visit properties has been a foundation of agricultural education practice in Australian higher education. These excursions are invariably popular with students, but their enjoyment of these activities may be largely due to factors other than the achievement of learning outcomes. This paper reports on a…