Designed to guide teachers through a 20-day sequence of preschool orientation activities, the manual presents a numbered sequence of topics with related objectives and explanations, preparation and planning needs, and specific activities for children. Section I is entitled "All Around Us" and focuses on guiding preschool children and…

The continuing development of educational professionals (teachers and administrators) takes place in three types of institutions. Advanced degree programs offered in colleges and universities that lead to the master's and doctorate degrees are the mainstay of continuing development. Second in importance are the staff development programs sponsored…

To answer important questions for educators concerning language skills, this paper argues that children must acquire new skills in order to process written language, and that the need for developing new skills stems from differences between oral and written language that are more fundamental than differences in mode. The paper first describes how…

In this study, the social interaction of 151 children, ages 8 through 13, attending a summer computer camp were observed as they worked with the computers. They were also asked to complete a questionnaire that focused on social dilemmas in a technological environment. The dilemmas focused on the acceptability of copying someone else's program or…

Students must be shown not only how to use study strategies, must also why the strategy should be undertaken and what it is expected to achieve. The how-to-do-it step is not sufficient for all students to grasp study strategies. The teaching of these strategies must be direct, deliberate, and systematic. The metacognitive skill (why) must…

Cooperative learning is a generic classroom technique that requires students to work and talk together about academic material while learning effective interpersonal skills. This packet, prepared in conjunction with the Minnesota School Effectiveness Program, describes the benefits of cooperative learning and defines its critical attributes,…

As increasing numbers of undergraduate students in higher education are engaging in online group discussions as part of their course work, there is a need to gain insights into the nature of the experience of learning in this new context. Previous studies have reported benefits for students who engaged in online discussions, but few describe these…

We describe the evolving learning design of a computer-based exercise called "Director's Cut" that challenges students to create their own video sequence from a set of clips we provide. The context is a film theory course where the community of educators have been interested in introducing practical exercises so students can, for…

The Learning Activities Questionnaire (LAQ) was designed and developed to identify which of the following learning strategies were used by individuals in a variety of academic and training environments: rote (passive and active); physical; elaboration; and grouping. After undergoing two pilot tests, the final version of the LAQ was administered to…

Production data from a longitudinal study of seven children in their first attempts to produce words containing fricatives are presented to illustrate how children use four distinct strategies to approach this relatively difficult class of sounds. The strategies are: (1) favorite sounds--an approach used by a subject who seemed to enjoy playing…

As measured by responses to a main-idea essay question and by written summaries of two passages, students' ability to abstract the macrostructure of problem/solution text read independently was improved by the use of structure training. (FL)

Semantic elaboration, a language-based mnemonic strategy, was taught to 15 students (aged five to nine years) with moderate learning difficulties over a six-month period, using pictures as stimuli. Among reported results was an improvement in overall performance on memorization of pairs of pictures. Generalization to items not used during teaching…

Investigates whether students could more easily remember synthetic words by rehearsing with definitions, examples, or sentence composing. Concludes that students who used sentence composing performed better on a posttest than those who had rehearsed using examples and definitions. (SRT)

Suggests using writing to enhance students' learning of content material because a positive environment that encourages writing allows students to explore, analyze, and synthesize what they are learning in a content classroom. Enumerates principles for facilitating comprehension and recommends using a guided writing procedure. (SKC)

Describes a Hebrew University program for academically disadvantaged students, focusing on a workshop component which emphasizes learning skills and study strategies. An evaluation of the workshop indicates that it leads to improved achievement in several academic fields (including the natural sciences). (DH)