This project had as its specific objective the development and field testing of a procedure for identifying the structure of technical concepts possessed by a group of selected quality control specialists. The associative theory of verbal behavior served as the rationale by which conceptual structures depicted by graphical maps of technical…

This paper examines some basic principles of learning theory that have been developed within the discipline of psychology. A brief resume of the psychologist's efforts to analyze the phenomenon of learning within a scientific setting is presented as well as attempts to apply this research to a practical situation (e.g. the classroom). More…

The papers in this volume were initially presented at a seminar on the development of reading comprehension, which explored basic research and the teaching of reading comprehenison. Researchers in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics and experts in curriculum design in reading gave presentations and reacted to one another's ideas. Each…

The ability to produce and recognize paraphrases is necessary for a child's linguistic development. The purpose of this paper is to explain how three basic sentence types interact with age in determining the strategy a child uses in producing paraphrases. Three paraphrase strategies considered are lexical substitution, syntactic rearrangement, and…

Examines the effects of Chomsky's theories of linguistics and language acquisition on language teaching methodology, specifically on the use of the audio-lingual method. Current trends in methodology move in two basic directions: 1) towards relaxation of the tighter restrictions of the audio-lingual method, and 2) towards development of techniques…

Perspective transformation is a consciously achieved state in which the individual's perspective on life is transformed. The new perspective serves as a vantage point for life's actions and interactions, affecting the way life is lived. Three conditions are basic to achieving perspective transformation: (1) "feeling" experience, i.e.,…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The ten titles deal with the following topics: (1) an inductive method for teaching three skills necessary for reading narrative fiction; (2) the use of reading strategies in secondary level content area classrooms; (3) seventh grade…

This paper provides information on the use of referential communication tasks (tasks that structure speaking and listening behaviors so that participants need to interact to achieve accurate comprehension) in evaluating students' comprehension and listening skills. An introduction discusses interactive listening and the referential communication…

Presented are materials related to the work of the Number and Measure and Rational Numbers working group of the Georgia Center for the Study of the Learning and Teaching of Mathematics. Much of the content reports on attempts to bring constructs from developmental psychology and mathematics to bear in understanding children's ideas of number and…

Television wide-angle lenses expand distances and increase apparent velocity, while long lenses compress space and reduce apparent velocity. Based on these assumptions, a study was conducted (1) to examine the ability of viewers of different ages to recognize how lenses change the "real world" they project and (2) to extend Jean Piaget's…

A study explored context effects on two selected indexes of communicative competence in the narrative language of a sample of first grade children. The 30 subjects each completed 2 tasks--the retelling of a story that had been read to them and the dictation of an original story. These narratives were recorded and analyzed for linguistic competence…

The application of computer technology to reading research has made it possible to study the perceptual processes that take place as people read with a level of precision never before attainable. This computer assisted research has revealed that where the eyes go for fixations is of significance to normal reading and that during each fixation only…

A study investigated the effect of Frank O'Hare's "Sentencecraft" sentence combining program on the written syntactic skills, reading comprehension level, and speed of average ability ninth-grade students. The sample consisted of 75 experimental group students and 68 control group students. Following a pretest, the experimental group…

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…

Reporting on the development, design, and implementation of an approach for teaching reading to rural black children in the intermediate grades, this paper is organized in three sections that reflect the framework of the project. The first section discusses the delineation of the theoretical framework for teaching reading, resulting in a rationale…