Students have specific learning style preferences, and these preferences may be different between male and female students. Understanding a student's learning style preference is an important consideration when designing classroom instruction. Therefore, we administered the visual, auditory, reading/writing, kinesthetic (VARK) learning preferences…

The increasingly integrative use of images with language in many different types of texts in electronic and paper media has created an urgent need to go beyond logocentric accounts of literacy and literacy pedagogy. Correspondingly there is a need to augment the genre, grammar and discourse descriptions of verbal text as resources for literacy…

In this paper the sociocultural notion of "scaffolding" and the way in which various "scaffolding" strategies support students' learning are examined through classroom data. A distinction is made between scaffolding at a macro level, consisting of a planned, "designed-in" approach to a unit of work in a subject discipline and the lessons that…

Researchers have found that the elderly are as capable of learning motor skills as younger persons but perform better under some conditions than others. For example, the elderly learn and perform motor skills more efficiently when there is additional time to respond to stimulus. Tasks which are self-regulated rather than directed by an external…

It is argued that learning from different sources greatly depends on the differential way in which these sources are perceived, for these perceptions determine to an important extent the mental effort expended in the learning process. Two ideas are discussed: (1) amount of mental effort investment (AIME), defined as the number of nonautomatic…

A look at the two dimensions of the structure of content for instructional purposes: 1) psychological; and, 2) logical. (HB)

The present study tested four predictions concerning the effects of instructional objectives as an adjunct aid in learning through the lecture method. First, the inclusion of objectives with the lecture was postulated to result in greater learning from the lecture. Second, objectives presentation by subsets was predicted to facilitate performance…

A conceptual model of how children process televised information was developed with the goal of identifying those parameters of the process that are both measurable and manipulable in research settings. The model presented accommodates the nature of information processing both by the child and by the presentation by the medium. Presentation is…

A sample of 503 sixth-grade students participated in a study assessing the relationship between modality of inference and spelling achievement. Each student completed the Dictation Spelling Test and the Modality of Inference Instrument; scores from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills were also available. The Modality of Inference Instrument was…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the strategy of allowing a student to choose the sensory channel in which he learns most efficiently and to determine if this choice results in increased learning rates. It was hypothesized that allowing a student to learn in channels of his choice would result in higher learning rates than when he was…

Thirty-two children each in grades 1-5 participated in an experiment designed to replicate and extend a study by Flavell and associates (1972) which hypothesized that "memorizing and perceiving are functionally undifferentiated for the young child, with deliberate memorization only gradually emerging as a separate and distinctive form of cognitive…

The author summarizes and reviews seven research studies which seek to determine the role of individual modal preference as related to learning to read. The seven studies are by Bateman (1968); Robinson (1968); Jones (1970); Bruininks (1968); Cripe (1966); de Hirsh, Jansky, and Langford (1966); and Bursuk (1971). Of these studies, only Bursuk…

Four papers detailing the Fuller Reading System and its successful use with low-IQ subjects and one paper discussing the System and the results of using it are presented in this collection. The subjects were 23 residents of Maryland's principal institution for the retarded. They ranged in age from eleven to 51 years and in Stanford-Binet IQ from…

A study began the development and initial testing of a method for predicting cost and training effectiveness of proposed training programs. A prototype Training Effectiveness and Cost Effectiveness Prediction (TECEP) model was developed and tested. The model was a method for optimization of training media allocation on the basis of fixed training…