The relationships between middle school students' multiple motivational goal orientations and their use of multiple cognitive and metacognitive strategies were studied with a focus on relations between these motivational and cognitive variables and students' academic achievement in two curriculum areas. Participants were 602 middle school students…

This paper attempts to merge specific psychological theories of knowledge acquisition, the impact of pictures on cognitive processes, and theories of effective pedagogical approaches to foreign language learning, in order to assess commercially available software for its effectiveness, specific impact on learning, and classroom uses. The first…

Literacy education experience shows that literacy is not easily disseminated to adults and that the skills of newly literate people are notable. Dropout, mastery, and retention rates are about 50 percent at each stage, so the effectiveness rate of some projects may only be 12-15 percent. To find causes for the low effectiveness of literacy…

The influence of theory on instructional-design models of the future is explored on the basis of the theoretical developments of today. Anticipated model changes are expected to result from disparate theoretical thinking in areas such as chaos theory, constructivism, situated learning, cognitive-learning theory, and general systems theory.…

Maps or graphical browsers of structural knowledge allow the user of a hypertext system to navigate from node to node through the structure as they portray the links between concepts spatially. This study examined the results of using two different graphical browsers that provide different amounts of information about the structure of the…

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, developed a way to systematically examine eight basic tendencies toward which different types of people tend to gravitate: introversion or extraversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. This booklet examines what these tendencies mean and how people with different…

An ethnographic study was conducted with the goal of comparing the botanical knowledge of nine sixth grade students with the botanical concepts developed in the elementary textbook series, Science, by Silver Burdett, 1985. The extent to which the child's conceptual framework resembles that of the scientist and the extent to which the textbook…

The paper reviews literature on three orientations to teachers' reflective thinking (cognitive, critical, and narrative). The cognitive approach includes studies of teachers' information processing and decision making, emphasizing how teachers make decisions. The critical approach has its roots in problem framing and ethical and moral reasoning.…

Leading educational researchers focused on education in the 21st century in a discussion of their ongoing work. Discussion was initially limited to the issue of cognitive strategies, skills, or styles that might be relevant to the year 2050. Subsequent discussion turned to consideration of aspects of ongoing research that hold the greatest promise…

Originally developed for the Department of Defense Schools (DoDDS) system, this learning package on language across the curriculum is designed for teachers who wish to upgrade or expand their teaching skills on their own. The package includes a comprehensive search of the ERIC database; a lecture giving an overview on the topic; the full text of…

A theory of how people learn certain procedural skills is presented. It is based on the idea that the teaching and learning that goes on in a classroom is like an ordinary conversation. The speaker (teacher) compresses a non-linear knowledge structure (the target procedure) into a linear sequence of utterances (lessons). The listener (student)…

The effect on performance of different formats for typical mathematics story problems was studied, along with the relationship of certain learner variables. More than 1200 children in grades 3-8, including over 220 learning-disabled students, were tested and/or interviewed. Story problems were in the usual format found in textbooks, an abbreviated…

Drawn from an annual symposium held at the University of Guam to recognize and encourage scholarly activities of graduate students in the reading education department and to promote continued interdepartmental dialogue on the teaching of reading, the nine papers in this compilation deal with various approaches to reading instruction. Topics…

Prepared by members of the Institute for Research on Teaching and the Center for the Study of Reading, the papers in this collection examine reading comprehension as an interactive process and explore how comprehension instruction occurs in the complex workplace of the classroom. Specific topics discussed in 20 papers include the following: (1)…

The program evaluated in this paper has a three-pronged design which includes two holistic strategies, Integrated Skill Development (ISD) and Thinking Across the Curriculum (TAC), in addition to the Supplemental Curriculum (SC). A pretest-posttest control group design with matching was employed. The program was conducted at the Cleveland School…