Intended for secondary English teachers, the materials and ideas presented here suggest ways to use media in the classroom in teaching visual and auditory discrimination while enlivening classes and motivating students. Contents include "Media Specialists Need Not Apply," which discusses the need for preparation of media educators with…

A total of 186 kindergarteners were pretested on number conservation and two cognitive style measures representing Kagan's impulsivity-reflectivity dimension and Santostefano's leveling-sharpening dimension. From this sample 72 nonconservers were assigned to one of three conservation training conditions: reversibility training, discrimination…

This book is a compilation of literature and research concerning how children learn. The first chapter is a historical introduction to research in learning that summarizes the major developments of the last 100 years and relates these developments specifically to children's learning. The main body of the text is divided into six major topics: (1)…

Reversals in poor and normal second-grade readers were studied in relation to their whole phonological error pattern in reading real words and nonsense syllables. Error categories included sequence and orientation reversals, other consonants, vowels, and total error. Reversals occurred in quantity only in poor readers, with large individual…

The effectiveness of short-term training on two communication tasks was assessed with seven and one-half olds. Twelve subjects were trained in trios for six sessions on tasks requiring complete description of a design for a listener to reproduce, and tasks requiring communication of critical information for a listener to discriminate the same…

This document reports on a study of how the eye and the hand become functionally coordinated during growth. A specific question researched is "How do children use their hands as perceptual tools for exploring objects in order to acquire information about them?" It was assumed that a pre-school child would have evolved a form of eye-hand…

This study was designed to examine the effects of age and sex on susceptibility to field dependence training and to determine whether the field dependence phenomenon is a function of cognitive style or of a general inability to make correct judgments because of confusing and inaccurate information. (MS)

This study investigated attention to and recognition of components in compound stimuli among infants and preschoolers. Oddity tasks with preschoolers and familiarization/novelty-preference tasks with infants demonstrated successful discrimination among stimuli components on basis of edge property information. Matching tasks with preschoolers and…

Studies the impact that musical discrimination training which incorporates models and discriminator foils, as well as modeling and imitation, has on beginning instrumental music classes. Shows that musical discrimination can be developed using these methods. Recommends further study to find effects of discrimination training on instrumental music…

This study evaluated the Task Demonstration Model for teaching discrimination skills with three teachers and their students (adolescents and young adults with moderate to severe mental retardation). The intervention required students to respond simultaneously. Students increased their percentage and rate of correct responding as well as their…

This study found that teachers' ratings of their 8 severely mentally handicapped pupils' (ages 9-18) classroom behavior were correlated with children's performance on a discrimination learning task. The factors of attention/distractibility and responsivity to consequences correlated significantly with number of errors and number of trials to…

Two studies with 33 reading-disabled and 31 non-reading-disabled second through fourth graders indicate that young disabled readers may not be able to hold phonemic information in their memories long enough to make adequate discrimination of phonological information within syllables. (SLD)

Describes a demonstration that recreates the central features of taste aversion (learning to avoid distinctively flavored food or drink paired with gastrointestinal illness) research. Rats are allowed to drink a saccharine flavored solution and then are given an injection of sodium chloride. They associate the unpleasant effects with the solution.…

Two experiments assessed recognition of emotion among physically abused and neglected preschoolers. Results showed that neglected children had more difficulty discriminating emotional expressions that control or abused children. Abused children displayed response bias for angry facial expressions. Control children viewed discrete emotions as…

The National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) published a new learning style instrument in 1986--the NASSP Learning Style Profile (LSP). The LSP yields independent scores on 24 discrete elements of learning style. Its purpose is to provide educators with a well-validated and easy to use instrument for diagnosing cognitive styles,…