An arts-in-education approach to teaching can be a vital and effective motivating force in a language arts classroom. One teaching strategy based on this approach is to design classroom activities that students can simply enjoy. Several activities that students have found enjoyable include building "happiness machines" based on Ray Bradbury's…

Serving as an introduction to a conference for Australian educators on developing oral communication skills, this paper reviews current methods of teaching speech skills. The paper describes a basic approach that holds that a learner's improved use of a skill is related to the number of satisfying experiences the learner has using the skill. It…

Designed for school personnel, the booklet suggests programing modes by which language arts may be organized to provide special learning activities for the gifted and talented (G/T) secondary school student. Among topics discussed in a series of 12 questions and answers are: identification of gifted and talented students; teaching objectives for…

Designed for school personnel, the booklet discusses identification strategies for elementary and secondary gifted and talented (G/T) students with specific recommendations for language learning. The role of foreign languages in the education of G/T students is discussed and identification of giftedness in language learning is surveyed. The…

The perceptions of parents of 113 developmentally delayed preschool children were compared with mental ages derived from the Cattell Infant Intelligence Scale and the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale. With the parents as informants, an Alpern-Boll Developmental Profile was completed. Findings demonstrated a high degree of correlation between the…

This paper briefly reports on a series of studies that explore the relationship between symbolic or pretend modes of reasoning and cognitive processes which underlie conservation of quantity. It is hypothesized that the mental transformations which the child makes while playing a game of make-believe, namely, the transformation from his original…

Presented are the results of a Delphi study designed to determine the objectives of secondary science methods courses and the concerns of the professors who plan them. The results present, in the order of importance, the three following concerns: (1) planning one or more science lessons, (2) constructing a classroom evaluation scheme, and (3)…

The point of view is presented that evaluation projects can be enriched by not using either an exclusively quantitative model or an exclusively qualitative model but by combining both models in one project. The concept of metaphor is used to clarify the usefulness of the combination. Iconic or holistic metaphors describe an object or event as…

Following a review of studies that propose ways of dealing with the problems that students have in reading mathematics, this paper suggests that the problems need to be approached in basically nontraditional ways. It proposes that in addition to useful, generalized approaches such as readability studies, vocabulary learning, and recognition of…

The basic thesis of this book is that reading is not a passive process by which people soak up words and information from pages, but an active process by which they predict, sample, and confirm or correct hypotheses about written text. Part One of the book examines the reading process and reading instruction, and it contains chapters that deal…

A number of studies exploring how beginning readers acquire knowledge that enables them to spell words fairly accurately and to recognize words correctly and quickly as they are reading are described in this report. (The reported studies were designed to test hypotheses derived from a theory of printed word learning proposed by L. C. Ehri.) In the…

Modern linguistic theory offers two main contributions to the improvement of writing: readability and appropriateness. Readability can be developed by improving the correctness of forms used and achieved by carrying out an error analysis on the student's writing to provide insights into errors and clause structure. Linguists have determined that…

While schools focus on individual learner development, community education should focus on the quality of life in communities. Two research projects are in progress with the purpose of exploring out-of-school learning, particularly for disenfranchised populations, and aimed at community concerns. One is the development of a referencing system that…

The Buffalo Public Schools have developed magnet schools to aid desegregation plans and to provide for different student needs and learning styles. The Academic Challenge Center is designed to meet concerns about declining reading and math scores. The Buffalo Traditional School emphasizes traditional learning styles and puts a high priority on…

Content area teachers should be aware of the five levels of vocabulary with which their students must cope. The five levels include standard words at the least complex level, transitional terms that have different meanings in the content area than in standard usage, technical terms specific to the subject area, changeable terms (similar to…