A program was developed for improving listening skills so as not to interfere with the cognitive processing of directions. The targeted population consisted of third, fourth, fifth, and eighth grade students in a growing middle class community located in the Midwest United States. Problems of decreased listening ability were documented through…

Guidance is offered in Spanish on the creation and use of alternative assessment, and a process model is presented that links assessment with curriculum and instruction, based on contemporary theories of learning and cognition. The introductory chapter provides background on the purposes of assessment and the need for new alternatives, with an…

A longitudinal phenomenographic investigation was conducted into a cultural change process at a secondary school. This change process positively influenced senior students' academic motivation, cognition, and achievement. The study involved a retrospective examination of the components of the change process and a specific investigation of how…

Age, gender, cultural, and socioeconomic differences in relations between middle school students' motivational goal orientations, their cognitive and metacognitive strategies, and their academic achievement in a variety of curriculum domains were studied. Studies to date typically have used either cognitive or motivational variables to account for…

Geometry is a fundamental part of the mathematics foundation provided by elementary education. Children have an intuitive understanding of geometry that they draw on when dealing with geometric concepts in activities like drawing, playing hopscotch, defending their "half of the room," and playing sports. This book offers no instruction…

This paper reports the latest in a series of studies investigating children's performance in solving division story problems involving remainders. One aspect of the work involved examining the way in which "sense-making" is involved in the interpretation of the numerical solution obtained. Subjects were 195 sixth, seventh, and eighth…

Participants at a conference on mathematics teaching discussed what it means to know and understand a subject and what teachers need to know, understand, and believe in order to teach a subject to elementary learners. The first section of the report covers the first day of the conference that was spent in a series of whole-group sessions.…

This discussion examines the reading and writing processes of persons with hearing impairments, particularly those leaving school and in transition from school to work. The reading/writing act is viewed from three perspectives: (1) cognitive science or information processing; (2) text organization and its functions; and (3) the processes whereby…

This document contains the following 30 papers (most with short abstracts): "The Teacher Transition Response" (Carley); "There Must Be Some Meaning to This: Storytelling as a Research Method" (Group for Collaborative Inquiry); "The Impact of Patient, Social and Political, Practice Environment, and Physician Factors on the Integration of Health…

Cognitive changes in college students from early in the freshman year to the end of the sophomore year were assessed using a pretest-posttest design. In all, 135 university students completed both a pretest and a posttest. The academic achievement measure used was the College Basic Academic Subjects Examination (CBASE), a test intended to assess…

This study examined planning processes and the acquisition of expert problem solving skills among individuals of different expertise on tasks of increasing complexity. Twelve French-speaking adult students of machining (novices) and 12 French-speaking teachers of machining (experts) in Quebec (Canada) were randomly assigned to a simple or complex…

Researchers of computer ability have been largely influenced by the Galtonian perspective of intelligence assessment: a predominantly linear, construct-driven model based on identifying statistically determined factors. The use of this methodology, though, has far more to do with utility than theoretical rigor. Notably absent from this kind of…

This study investigated the cognitive benefits of learning how to program by determining the degree of cognitive transfer of programming skills at a construct level to solving analogous problems in other domains. Subjects, who were students enrolled in four sections of the beginning Pascal programming course and two sections of a calculus course,…

This study sought to examine to what extent language learners in an immersion classroom used their native language and the foreign language when performing the cognitive operations involved in math word problems. Thirty-two third- through sixth-graders in a Spanish immersion program participated in the study. Data were collected through: (1)…

Three learning modules are described and investigated as they reflect different students' conceptions of and approaches to learning. The Schoolwork Module (SWM) focuses on task performance and involves a passive, incremental, piecemeal, and rote memory method of learning, parallel to what might be implied by the Information Processing model of…