Research on hemispheric specialization indicates that the two hemispheres of the brain are specialized to perform different functions. A visual style of thinking is associated with the right hemisphere, while a verbal style is associated with the left hemisphere. The possibility of a relationship between psychological androgyny and sex role…

A study examined the ability of subjects of varying ages to write summaries of very familiar material. In particular, it explored the subjects' planning activities both prior to and during the summarization task. The subjects, 15 fifth, 16 seventh, and 15 eleventh grade students and 11 college students, were given two stories to study for a week.…

For use by teachers in helping students become better writers, this booklet describes and illustrates cognitive mapping, a prewriting technique that helps students combine their verbal and visual skills in order to produce ideas and to plan stories, plays, reports, or essays. The first section of the booklet discusses the interrelations between…

This monograph is designed to provide practical classroom suggestions, including sample lesson plans, to show how teachers can improve the problem-solving competence of students at all educational and ability levels. The examples provided show that problem-solving instruction can be integrated with teaching the content of particular topics. While…

The few studies concentrating on adult age changes in discrimination shift behavior have reported that the performance of elderly adults on such tasks is inferior to that of younger adults and, in fact, similar to that of children. To determine whether verbal labeling, which has facilitated the performance of young children, would also reduce age…

Six studies which were conducted to determine the effects of testwiseness training on middle school and undergraduate college students' test scores are described. Testwiseness was defined as the cognitive ability or set of skills which a test taker can use to improve his or her score. Testwiseness training presented methods for using deductive…

Four portfolio managers who handle common stocks were observed in a study that examined the preference of an alternative decision making process in an information overload situation. The week of observation was arranged so that the portfolio manager focused primarily on the decision making portion of the work rather than on the presentation and…

E. Boder and S. Jarrico have developed a test designed to measure the cognitive deficits underlying reading disabilities, which they claim will identify two basic reader subtypes: those with deficits in auditory-linguistic processing skills (dysphonetic) and those with the inability to process visual-spatial information (dyseidetic). To examine…

This comparative examination considers a new era of research on children's learning. How children learn from microcomputers is studied, in light of research on children and television; and such issues are illuminated as how television and computers differ in their historical and economic contexts, how such differences affect their ability to serve…

The efforts to develop and study the effects of a microcomputer program to enhance children's decoding and word recognition skills are described in this paper. The first section of the paper discusses theory and research in the area of cognitive psychology upon which the program, "Construct a Word," is based. The second section describes…

With practical applications for parents and teachers, this book uses diary entries, tape recordings, and videotapes made by the child's mother from a researcher's perspective to chronicle a child's reading and writing development from birth to age three. The introduction provides an overview of how children learn to talk, read, and write;…

Designed to help classroom teachers discover how to use computers effectively in teaching writing, this annotated bibliography contains citations of articles that have appeared in education journals, books, and the ERIC system. Among the topics covered in the more than 50 articles cited are the following: (1) feedback programs for individualized…

To discover the strategies good and poor readers employ at grades two, three, and four, a case study focused on the oral reading of four students (two good readers and two poor readers) in their second, third, and fourth grade years. Data were examined and interpreted. All four children either increased their ability to make use of cuing systems…

Organized in three sections, this report presents the first case study from a project aimed at developing prototypes of ideal textbook chapters. The report (1) discusses the Ideal Text Project, in which a number of researchers in instructional science have been challenged to design a textbook chapter that incorporates the design features they…

Two studies were conducted to extend the application and explore the parameters of the concept tree and rational set generator instructional design techniques. The first study was conducted with high school English students. Results indicated that students who studied the concept tree performed no differently on the classification tests than…