This study investigated the effects of culture-specific background knowledge and inferences upon second-language readers' comprehension of text. Ten Korean adult second-language readers were asked to think aloud as they read a short story from another culture and then answer a detailed set of postreading questions. (20 references) (VWL)

Why children under 10 years do not use their mathematics knowledge to build a shortcut strategy to solve inversion problems was studied with 88 elementary school students in Munich (Germany). Most could use the shortcut but did so only when it did not compete with a more familiar strategy. (SLD)

Interviews with 30 Ontario (Canada) elementary teachers revealed that teachers were aware of many characteristics of gifted, learning-disabled (LD), and gifted LD children and were aware of similarities in cognitive and creative abilities in gifted and gifted LD children. They were less aware of creative thinking characteristics of LD children.…

It is argued that there are only three core instructional models (behavior, development, and apprenticeship) and that within the framework of these models, only five types of knowledge can be acquired: (1) declarative; (2) procedural; (3) conceptual; (4) analogical; and (5) logical. Examples are presented. (SLD)

Teacher rankings were collected from 16 elementary teachers for 28 students with communication disorders and 28 nondisabled students who had the same achievement/ability indices. Results indicated that teachers trained in a collaborative model of service delivery were more accurate in their perceptions of ability levels for students with…

New methods for representing the structural properties of domain-specific knowledge were studied. Network representations of data from 40 college students' ratings of the relatedness of domain concepts were derived using the Pathfinder scaling algorithm, and similarity between students' and instructor's networks was then assessed using a…

The role of analogical mapping in the formation of conceptual misrepresentations was studied by analyzing target-domain inferences generated by 193 third graders learning from an analogy. Explicit knowledge of the instructional goal decreased the number of conflicting inferences. Implications for learning are discussed. (SLD)

The concept of metacognition is discussed, with a review of attempts at definition. A. Brown's (1987) four historical roots of metacognition--verbal reports as data, executive control, self-regulation, and other-regulation--are summarized. Influence from the developmental theory of L. S. Vygotsky (1978) may result in a clearer conceptualization of…

To test whether cognitive interest in a topic is affected by how much the reader knows about the topic, 36 undergraduate students read a text, gave a rating for cognitive interest, and answered 2 recall measures. Associations among knowledge, cognitive interest, and text recall are discussed for their implications for learning. (SLD)

Three gifted and three learning-disabled gifted students (ages 13-15) viewed themselves on videotape solving mathematical problems and responded to questions pertaining to their problem-solving strategies. The non-learning-disabled students applied substantially more cognitive and metacognitive knowledge to the problem-solving task. (Author/DB)

This study examined pupils' knowledge of and feelings about mental handicap, through interviews with second year students in a British comprehensive school and a questionnaire survey of 179 students. Results indicated that girls felt that disabled persons were capable of benefiting from integration, whereas boys' attitudes were more ambiguous.…

In a study of knowledge activation and sentence mapping, subjects read stories that described concrete actions, and then the content of the stories was manipulated (i.e. stories were written that implied different emotional states). It is suggested that the more emotionally evoking situations one encounters the more memory traces are stored and…

Discusses two authors' views on critical thinking. McPeck denies the possibility of critical thinking, stating it is burdened by informal logic. Paul believes critical thinking includes logical, epistemological, psychological, and social dimensions springing from moral and political concerns. The paper examines the debate over general versus…

This study of 5 hearing-impaired and 6 normally hearing children (ages 1-3) and their mothers found that mother directives were more frequently expressed during interaction with children exhibiting less advanced language abilities, and both groups of children were more likely to produce topically related responses to their mother's directive…

Analyzes synthesis essays of graduate students for the importance and origin of information and for the quality of key rhetorical moves. Confirms the interrelatedness of comprehension and composing processes and illustrates how writers, with varying levels of topic familiarity, use both their knowledge of disciplinary topics and their experience…