Explored the information processing abilities associated with expertise in literature in high school and college students. Found that literary experts were superior to novices in gist-level recall, extraction of interpretations, and breadth of aspects addressed of literary texts but not in comprehension of scientific texts. (AA)

Examines young children's learning, focusing on strategies used to apply old knowledge in new learning. Data from a longitudinal study of early elementary students' mathematical knowledge indicated that children's abilities to learn were strongly influenced by their understanding of the contexts in which they were required to participate in…

Reviews previous research on advance organizers (introductory text adjuncts intended to provide readers of expository text with a meaningful context within which to process unfamiliar, or difficult, new information). Shows that they inspire significant comprehension increases among readers whose prior knowledge "subsumers" are inadequate to…

Investigates whether advance organizers facilitate the acquisition of subordinate information from text. Examines the influences of reader's background knowledge, advance organizers, relative importance of idea units, and idea units' position within a text structure on the recall of textual information. (SR)

The differences among elaborative-interrogation, reading-to-understand, and no-exposure control conditions with familiar domain material in contrast to unfamiliar domain material were studied for 50 Canadian and 50 west German undergraduates. Results provide evidence of effects of both elaborative interrogation and prior knowledge on learning.…

Describes how content area teachers balked at the need for prereading activities. Discusses how the teacher realized the importance of such activities through a variety of inservice activities. (RS)

Compares the practice of assessing prior learning in the United States and Britain and reviews major issues: nature of the evidence, collection of evidence into portfolios, evaluation, and costs. (SK)

What students want from apprenticeships are (1) immediate coordinated work experience after vocational training; (2) careers with advancement potential; (3) formal systems of recognition; (4) credit for prior learning; and (5) opportunities to learn while earning a decent wage. (SK)

Discusses the role of meetings in improving job performance, identifies adult learning principles that may enhance the planning and delivery of business meetings, describes the component parts of business meetings, and presents a matrix that integrates adult learning principles with the management of business meetings. (Six references) (LRW)

Describes a study that investigated computer anxiety among Lebanese teachers known to use computers in their regular educational programs. Highlights include use of the Computer Anxiety Rating Scale (CARS), international experiences, educational attributes including language of instruction, and computer experience. (Author/LRW)

Clarifies the concepts of personal and situational interest and their relation to motivation. Presents evidence for substantial relations between interest and text learning. Finds these relations appear to be stronger for deep-level learning than surface-level learning and seem to be largely independent of prior knowledge and cognitive ability.…

Examines effects of aural, visual, and combined aural/visual conditions on the emotional response to music and dance of musicians and nonmusicians. Indicates no significant differences in perceived artistic tension based on musical background or on experimental conditions. Responses were similar regardless of prior consideration of the existence…

Uses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to predict how much readers would learn from texts based on the estimated conceptual match between their topic knowledge and the text information. Shows a nonmonotonic relationship in which learning was greatest for texts that were neither too easy nor too difficult. Finds LSA was as effective at predicting…

Investigates the study abroad experience of two students in a summer program in France to see what kind of interactions influenced their learning. Results show that while homestays played a clear role in learning, other factors such as the nature of the pre-departure preparation meetings, absence of an on-site director, and prior cross-cultural…

Describes an experiment that evaluated features of TEXNET abstracting software, compared the use of keywords and phrases that were automatically extracted, tested hypotheses about relations between abstractors' backgrounds and their reactions to abstracting assistance software, and obtained ideas for further features to be developed in TEXNET.…