Presented in this paper is a multicultural curriculum design with an underlying conceptual understandinq which takes into account the commonalities found among the experiences of various ethnic groups. A common framework to be used for each ethnic group permits the teacher to generalize the experiences of the different ethnic gropus. The model for…

The study involving 60 learning disabled (LD) and 30 normal achieving seventh through ninth graders was designed to identify adolescents homogeneously defined as exhibiting a "specific learning disability in arithmetic" and to determine if the cognitive processes (visual-spatial, visual-reasoning, and visual-memory) are related to the academic…

A major goal of mathematics teaching is the involvement of students in the personal process of discovering mathematical ideas and formulating problems. The process of an inductive leap followed by a deductive argument is used in mathematics courses at Phillips Exeter Academy (New Hampshire). Mathematical problems are presented in which the givens…

Professional discourse among educators often includes the use of "slogans" and "generalizations." Generalizations are usually more precise than slogans, which can be interpreted differently and to various degrees. During the implementation of open education curricula in several elementary schools, the evolution of teachers'…

During socialization, individuals begin to understand increasingly broader and more abstract units of personal and social reality. Subjects (N=97) ranging in age from 13 to late middle age completed a linguistic task in which they could impose higher order conceptions on lower order descriptions by identifying different level similarities within…

The present study: (1) identified certain scientific misconceptions possessed by high school and university students; (2) identified, by written and interview means, the origins of these misconceptions; and (3) classified the misconceptions according to their origin. A pilot study using grade 9 high school students showed that, although more…

Research in person perception has shown that children's descriptions of themselves and others evolve from being concrete and superficial during childhood to being abstract and inferential during adolescence. Such research was extended by focusing on the constructs 6-14 years-olds (N=106) use to describe the identifications they have formed with…

Reported is a study of the relationship between degree of concept relatedness of an instructional sequence and a person's locus of control orientation. Locus of control orientation for the 541 high school biology students involved in the study was evaluated as measured by the adult Nowicki-Strickland scale. The experimental instructional treatment…

Reported is a research project which investigated whether junior high students in the Ithaca, New York, area can acquire and use the "concept mapping" and "Gowin's 'V' mapping" strategies to facilitate meaningful learning. Concept mapping involves the identification, hierarchical organization, and graphic depiction of…

This handbook is for use by content area teachers in grades three through six who want to help students improve their comprehension of both oral and written language. The first three chapters discuss the nature of comprehension and establish the general philosophical framework for the strategies and activities that make up the major portion of the…

Minorities have for some time faced underrepresentation in the technical professions. However, recent statistics indicate that many more minorities are enrolled in higher education than ever before. This report centers on identifying the particular difficulties that bilingual Hispanic students majoring in technical subjects have in performing…

The purposes of this study were (1) to investigate the metalinguistic knowledge children have acquired from their environment before formal instruction, and (2) to examine the relationship between evolving writing and reading behavior. Twenty middle-class children ranging in age from 4.1 years to 5.11 years were selected. The Goodman and Cox…

The aim of this study is to suggest an alternative to the essay testing method of assessing structural understanding of concepts, which suffers from time constraints and lack of scoring reliability. In this method, students' relationship judgments between concept pairs are examined directly rather than by means of multidimensional scaling analysis…

An exposition is made of a method to elicit students' comprehension of the meaning of words commonly used in science, which may be influential in determining what they learn. The method's aim is to elucidate features in students' understanding of childrens' science (that found before formal teaching of science), student science (that found after…

The questions of whether undergraduate students use different processes in evaluating their own learning in a course, and whether such differences are related to differences in personality development or cognitive development were studied. It was predicted that students possessing well developed abstract conceptual structures would show a more…