The aim of the panel on reading comprehension, sponsored by the National Institute of Education Conference on Studies in Reading, was to determine the influence of intellectual factors, general experiences with the world, knowledge specific to the particular reading task, and general decoding skills to successful reading performance. In addition,…

Historical perspectives on nonformal education are examined in this report which is one of a series on nonformal education. Background information for the series is included in document SO 008 058. Chapter 1 relates nonformal education to the concept of development now held by such international assistance agencies as the World Bank and UNESCO.…

A study was designed to test the expectation that different individuals have different cognitive styles, which, if true, may be useful in investigating characteristics and psychological impacts of media utilization. Cognitive style refers to an individual's way of acquiring and processing information. Characteristics of the visual type and haptic…

A study was made to determine whether different methods of visual presentations would affect the retention rate of individuals with two distinct types of perception--visual and haptic. The visual type, according to a study by Viktor Lowenfeld in 1957, is marked by the following characteristics: (1) ability to see wholes, break them into visual…

A Piagetian preschool emphasizes the child's active construction of mental images rather than passive association of words and pictures with real objects. The role of the teacher is neither to dictate good behavior nor to transmit ready-made predigested knowledge. Her role is to help the child to control his own behavior and to find things out as…

The development of an instrument for evaluating cognitive growth in preprimary children by means of observational techniques is reported. Areas of growth in pre-mathematic skills were defined for this purpose as: Imitating, recognizing, classifying, matching, comparing, understanding, counting, computing, and measuring. Each is described, and…

Eighty sixth-grade subjects, split into five independent groups, learned two PA lists of 12 noun pairs each. Two groups performed under traditional transfer conditions with lists conforming to a negative transfer paradigm, A-B, A-C, or to a reference paradigm A-B, C-D. Two other groups learned the same lists under a syntactic PA method where the…

Three unproven assumptions may account for the expository teaching used in new social studies which are designed for inductive teaching. 1) It is assumed that teachers and pupils ask questions of a high cognitive level, whereas research and informal observation support the opposite view. 2) Discovery learning requires a pure inductive strategy. 3)…

Twenty-seven kindergarten subjects were trained on two different double classification matrix tasks to determine whether they were hierarchically related. Prior behavioral analyses had shown one task to be simpler than the other. It was assumed that, in hierarchical transfer relationships, one order of task acquisition is more favorable than…

The paper endeavors to delineate more clearly the special reading comprehension problem of the Alaskan Eskimo and Indian. Reading comprehension is essentially a cognitive process -- the ability to engage in rigorous abstract thinking. A number of formal anthropological reports indicate that Alaskan natives, especially the Eskimo, are deficient in…

To explore the impact of an introductory sociology course on concepts held by college students, a study was executed on the images of sociology and sociologists, the variation of this image with other variables, the degree and direction of change of these images on completing an introductory course, and variability among students' changes in…

This study determined which intellectual abilities account for IQ changes over the school year. All the Head Start subjects involved in the study (35 boys and 33 girls, mean age 44.1 months) lived in poverty under conditions of urban deterioration. The subjects were initially given the Standord-Binet Intelligence Scale in the fall and were tested…

During the past decade interest in developing thinking skills has continued to be high and particular attention has been given to basic inquiry of the cognitive processes that are used in investigating topics and problems in the social studies. The central purpose of this study is to identify a set of processes that may be used to plan instruction…

This curriculum is designed primarily for use in individualized classrooms where the teacher is working with an assistant, but it has also been proven effective in traditional classrooms and in remedial situations. Program four focuses on four abilities as they relate to the basic symbol system of the classroom. These are the abilities to:…

A three-year longitudinal study was conducted with 895 Head Start children to examine the development of self-regulatory abilities during the preschool years. The purpose was to discover, given the behaviors measured, whether there is convergent and discriminant validity for the existence of one or more dimensions of self requlatory behaviors…