As a means of providing suggestions for improving the quality of the courseware used in computer based education (CBE), this report reviews and evaluates current thought and research on the origins, characteristics, and effectiveness of existing approaches to courseware design. After a brief summary of some of the general problems encountered in…

Drawn from a symposium presented at the 1979 National Reading Conference, the four papers in this collection describe a notion of conceptual readability, an approach contrasting with traditional readability computations (number of words per sentence and degree of familiarity of individual words) and focusing on the concepts communicated by the…

Much recent cognitive and artificial intelligence research has focused on the development of "schema theory." This theory supposes the existence of knowledge and memory structures that encode prototypical descriptions of familiar concepts. Schema theory has developed in a scientific environment that stresses interdisciplinary approaches…

Defining a "misconception" as an error of translation (transformation, correspondence, interpolation, interpretation) between two different kinds of information which causes students to have incorrect expectations, a Taxonomy of Errors has been developed to examine student misconceptions in an introductory biology course for science…

A seriation task (assembling a set of nesting cups) was used in this study to examine developmental changes in young children's ability to restructure a situation. Forty young children, eight each at 18, 24, 30, 36, and 40 months of age, participated in the study. Each child was presented with five nesting cups and was told he or she could play…

Adults must understand the development of the child's concept of death to comprehend children's questions about death and answer them appropriately. Children under 5 years of age view death as reversible and not final and may believe that the dead can breathe, feel, talk and continue to grow. While young children may believe in the reversibility…

Presented is an analysis of a concept teaching technique that was developed according to a theoretical perspective which emphasizes the importance of a student's existing knowledge in influencing that person's subsequent learning. Significant differences between an experimental group which was exposed to this instructional strategy, and the…

This workbook in Italian for learning the numbers from one to ten is intended for use in a bilingual education setting. It is introduced and concluded by a song about playing "ring around the rosy" with numbers. Each paqe has a pen and ink drawing illustrating the number and a sentence about the picture and the number. (AMH)

Because the conceptual and grammatical constructions of English and Chinese vary drastically, Chinese students often have difficulty learning to think and write in English. Cultural conflicts of young Chinese in America compound their difficulties with the English language. The old values expressed by Chinese affect students' abilities to write…

The teacher learning module described here focuses on encouraging teachers to draw examples from students' experiences and to test the student's understanding of concepts and principles. The module covers the methods of using instruction for teaching concepts through the use of examples and illustrations. This descriptive report provides further…

Two studies are described which were conducted at the University of Kansas Center for Research on the Influence of Television on Children to evaluate the effects of form and content independently on the social behavior of young children. In both studies, preschool children were observed during an unstructured play session in a laboratory room…

The report discusses research activities carried out to investigate the effects of various teaching procedures on vocational skill and concept learning by handicapped students. The report is divided into five principal chapters (sample subtopics in parentheses): vocational education for the handicapped (mainstreaming); a review of concept learning…

To inform and interconnect educational practitioners, knowledge-makers, policymakers, and the consuming public around the issues and potential of career education, the Career Education Policy Project (CEEP) collaborated with several existing programs to expose out-of-town leaders of the career education movement to the federal policymaking…

The major virtue of educational criticism is that it expands our understanding of how we come to know, consequently creating new avenues for educational evaluation and research. The task of the educational critic is to write in a manner enabling the reader to vicariously participate in classroom life, thus becoming familiar with the emotional…

Two ways in which the college teacher accustomed to formal thought and formal teaching can reach students who are more adept at concrete learning are suggested. Guidelines are provided for the first method, which entails the incorporation of activities and materials into the regular lecture or lecture-discussion format of the class. The second,…