A study examined the role of metadiscourse characteristics and level of student anxiety as they affect learning from social studies textbooks. Metadiscourse is defined as an author's overt or non-overt presence in the discourse in order to direct rather than inform readers--the linguistic material given to readers so they will understand what is…

A study assessed the effect of the use of reasoning message strategies on (1) a generally accepted goal of instruction (critical thinking) and (2) the affective behavior of students (attitudes toward the instruction). Subjects, 68 college students enrolled in journalism/mass communication classes, participated in one of three treatment groups that…

This book discusses the meaning, importance, and uses of intuition. In the first chapter the development of the conceptual history of intuition is traced from the ancient seers, religion, art, psychology, and philosophy. In chapter 2, work which has contributed to the development of intuition as a philosophical and psychological concept is…

Observation has suggested that different subgroups of precocious readers might be distinguished by different patterns of strengths and weaknesses. In particular, it seems that one group of children might be distinguished by the strength of their top-down, conceptually driven processes and another by their strong bottom-up, text driven processes.…

Interpersonal power has been defined as the ability of an agent to alter the behavior of a target through means-control, attractiveness, and credibility. To identify and delineate situations of influence in personal relationships, undergraduate students either wrote influence descriptions (N=96), made similarity judgments on the original 96…

Recent research suggests that an understanding of a simple children's story can demand sophisticated knowledge of concepts, social life, and literary forms. A well-written story for beginning readers will relate goal-directed event sequences in a coherent and relatively complete form, but understanding the story involves processes extending beyond…

A study investigated the effects of nonverbal and verbal classification abilities on reading comprehension. Subjects, 104 fourth grade students, were tested on three measures of classification skill (a shifting of criteria task, a free sorting task, and a three-level hierarchical classification task) and on a measure of recall of relevant story…

Teaching reading comprehension as a process rather than a product demands new instructional techniques. As the psycholinguistic model of reading suggests, readers use prior knowledge and linguistic competence to confirm, reject, or revise predictions on the text's meaning. Methods increasing readers' consciousness of their role in the…

A study was conducted to investigate the respective contributions of personal and social factors (initial competence and imitation of modeled responses) in children's observational learning of conservation. Subjects included 180 first-grade nonconservers from six schools attended by French-speaking middle class pupils. All subjects failed…

To explore how readers create textual meanings or interpretations from written materials, a study that investigated reading from a semiotic perspective was conducted. The study's design was based on the principle of prior ethnography and employed data collection techniques common to field studies: participant/intervention and interviewing.…

The "symbol systems approach" to the study of computers in education that is outlined avoids the pitfalls of past media research--particularly research on the effects of television on children's learning and knowledge--and asserts that media can be usefully distinguished in terms of the symbol systems they present and the kinds of…

In reviewing current literature on the importance of examples in the process of teaching learning, this report takes into particular consideration textbook approaches that emphasize the role of examples for comprehension and motivation. Utilizing a constructive theory of prose comprehension, it then attempts to specify the function of examples in…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate children's understanding of the relationship of narrators to the texts they narrate and how children's developing cognitive abilities influence that understanding. The subjects, 164 children aged 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 10, heard a series of short passages containing several characters, one of whom was the…

Two studies examined how the factors of content-relevant knowledge and text organization influence students' abilities to study and to remember text information. The first experiment examined the effect of prior content knowledge on students' ability to identify important information in the text. Forty 7th- and forty 11th-grade students, experts…

Human factors engineering can be defined as the application of scientific principles, methods, and data drawn from a variety of disciplines to the development of engineering systems in which people play a significant role. Since human factors issues arise in every domain in which humans interact with the products of a technological society, six…