The impact of prior learning on new learning is highlighted by the case of Dean, a Year 8 student who developed his own method to find the sum of the interior angles of a polygon without knowing why his method worked. Enriched transcripts and visual displays of the cognitive, social (Dreyfus, Hershkowitz, & Schwarz, 2001) and affective elements…

Focusing on the composing process, this series of articles discusses improving composing by exploring personal experience and the use of computers and specific computer composition programs for teaching writing. (HTH)

Describes the method implemented at West Virginia University for evaluating and granting life experience credit to school administrators. (WD)

Develops a text-specific prior knowledge measure that predicts the likelihood of a student's success in recalling the content of a reading passage. (HOD)

Describes a teaching method that combines the concepts of the structural overview and concept attainment in order to help students read content area textbooks. (FL)

Describes two experiments that were conducted to determine the relative influence of text data and prior knowledge on the kinds of inferences children make when answering questions about stories. (HOD)

Supports the function of analogy in activating specific background knowledge and generally related knowledge in reading unfamiliar text, a view consistent with emerging schema theoretic notions. (AEA)

Experiences in prior learning programs are discussed by three adult learners. The College of New Rochelle's Life Experience Portfolio Program, Marylhurst Education Center's Prior Learning Program, and Ohio University's Prior Learning Program are summarized. (MLW)

Results of this investigation indicate that the possession of high prior knowledge concerning the topic read greatly aided comprehension of that topic. (HOD)

Regression equations were formulated to determine the predictability of the College Level Examination Program performance from ACT scores. Equation strength prompted further investigation to determine if a relationship could be established. The tally matrix from which probabilities were computed was found to be effective for predictive purposes.…

Studied how toddlers respond to interactive multimedia. Found that 2- to 3-year olds can engage in computer interactions, but that purposeful and meaningful interactions may not begin until children are about two-and-a-half years old. Prior knowledge plays a strong role in toddlers' computer experience. Human interaction is vital to help…

Examined reasoning in normal, autistic, and deaf individuals. Found that deaf individuals who grow up in hearing homes without fluent signers show selective impairments in theory of mind similar to those of autistic individuals. Results suggest that conversational differences in the language children hear accounts for distinctive patterns of…

How students develop forms for self-regulating learning is explored. It is suggested that they experiment, bootstrapping newer forms of self-regulated learning from prior forms. Obstacles are obtaining sufficient practice, remembering how learning was enacted, and reasoning about factors that affect learning. (SLD)

Argues that epistemological beliefs of community college students can impact their learning processes. Explains that epistemological beliefs interact with other knowledge structures. Reports on a study that explores the association between students' epistemological beliefs and learning processes. Suggests there are relationships between Fixed…

Three experiments involving 350 undergraduates addressed whether implicit learning is sensitive to a subject's entire range of learning or whether explicit knowledge is an important factor in the more complex learning of an artificial grammar. Results suggest that implicit learning occurs only at the simplest level of complexity. (SLD)