One fifth grade student, Martha, was encouraged to develop her informal ratio and proportion strategies during a 6-month teaching experiment. The challenges Martha faced during the teaching experiment are described. The current study supports the claim made by Kaput and West (1994) that initial instruction on ratio and proportion based on…

A study investigated the role of prior knowledge in ambiguous text interpretation by directly measuring readers' knowledge of, and level of involvement with, three distinct topical domains that could be assigned during reading of an ambiguous passage. Subjects, 52 athletes of average or above average reading ability competing in one of three…

A study examined the extent to which common knowledge structures and the presence of common performance components are important factors in reasoning. The eye fixations of 37 college students were recorded as they solved four types of complex inductive reasoning tasks: (1) verbal analogies, (2) figural analogies, (3) verbal series completions, and…

A study was conducted to investigate the effects of high and low relevant text underlining and annotating (making margin notes or other marks to indicate important material) on test performance. The subjects, 67 college freshmen, were randomly assigned to one of four experimenter-generated conditions: (1) high relevant underlining; (2) high…

Prior knowledge of the content of a passage should reduce the effort required to encode the passage, and facilitate its recall. The results of two experiments on the effects of prior knowledge upon comprehension of simple technical prose are presented. The procedure was to collect ratings of the amount of prior knowledge for individual passage…

The main experience of an ideal reader while reading a text is an "envisionment" of that text, a representation in the reader's mind of the content of the text. According to this view the envisionment grows and sometimes changes as the reader progresses through the text, and the ideal reader not only updates and supplements the…

Psycholinguistics, with its emphasis on language processes rather than products, is particularly compelling when applied to the search for underlying connections between reading and writing. One such connection is best stated in the following propositions about writing and learning to write: (1) at no time are the acts of reading and writing as…

Accreditation issues raised by the use of educational technology not being substantially different from those raised during the decade of the seventies by the nontraditional education movement, there are several lessons about accreditation issues which are applicable to both movements. For example, credentialing and accreditation issues are…

Examined the influence of familiarity with peers on social cognition in second and fourth grade children who segmented a videotape of the behavioral stream of a peer. Children given prior information broke the stream into fewer, larger segments. Prior information affected fourth graders more than second graders. (SKC)

A survey of 23 faculty active in the Adult Liberal Studies program examined faculty attitudes about older students in higher education. Faculty generally felt that adults have better skills and more cognitive skills than traditional students. Faculty also were pleased with the structure of the adult program. (CH)

Discusses five ways to determine the amount and quality of prior knowledge children bring to a topic: (1) free recall tasks, (2) word association tasks, (3) structured questions, (4) recognition tasks, and (5) unstructured discussion. (FL)

Describes New Jersey's alternate route to teacher certification, designed to attract good teachers with practical experience in such fields as vocational education. This provisional teacher program is composed of three phases: (1) certification, (2) placement, and (3) training. (CH)

Describes a study that investigated how young readers respond to text when a teacher uses an anticipation exercise within the framework of a small or large group discussion. The dynamics operating in classroom situations that use anticipation in small or large group contexts are observed and described. (FL)

Argues that the mystery surrounding comprehension development can be dispelled by an understanding of schema theory and linguistic theory and especially by an understanding of W. Kintsch's model of comprehension, which draws from those bodies of theory. Describes teaching methods based upon Kintsch's model. (FL)

The paper provides a college mathematics student's concept maps, definitions, and essays to support the thesis that language-based prior knowledge can influence students' cognitive processes of mathematical concepts. A group of intermediate algebra students who displayed terms mainly from the spoken language on the first and the second concept…