The current discourse about access can be changed by using three adjectives: old, wide, and deep. Regarding the first, since the 1870s, when the professionalization and specialization of knowledge took off in so many fields, inequalities in education have actually increased where it matters most--who knows how much of what is available to be…

In 1993, the Centre for Instructional Development at Centennial College, Ontario, Canada received funding to investigate the effects of student diversity on prior learning assessment evaluation processes and to develop guidelines to respond to any effects demonstrated. A review of the literature identified six barriers to equitable evaluation:…

Sentence comprehension is more than a syntactically autonomous issue and relies on the clues that are not part of the grammar. This paper considers "world knowledge," in this case prior knowledge of the story being read, as one such clue. In section 1, "reversibility" of sentences is discussed. "Sentence ambiguity" is discussed in section 2.…

The purpose of this study was to characterize the prior conceptions of molecular structure that organic chemistry students expressed as they learned to interpret nuclear magnetic resonance spectra, and to describe the problem-solving strategies that students employ as they determine molecular structure. The two questions that frame this study…

A study addressed the relationship of culturally related schema to comprehension and examined the effect of instruction using thematic units upon the development of background knowledge. Subjects were 25 pupils (aged 8 to 10 years) enrolled in a primary school in Scotland and 21 students enrolled in a 3rd-grade class in Texas. Subjects listened to…

This document summarizes the National Institute on the Assessment of Experiential Learning conference in July 1989, during which educators from the field of adult education met to discuss prior learning assessment (PLA), a process developed for awarding credit for college-level knowledge acquired outside the classroom. Some educators were…

A study investigated one dimension of metacognition--the knowledge of cognition--in first language (L1) and second language (L2) writing. Subjects were 20 students (10 L1 and 10 L2) in a first level college writing course. A questionnaire elicited subjects' definitions of good writing, their notions of the constituent features of the writing…

Two studies explored the use of students' remembrances of school during preservice elementary education pedagogy courses. The studies assumed that cognitive schemas activated by writing remembrances would mediate the influence of experience on the interpretation of course content. The studies examined what kind of school experiences preservice…

This book is intended to bring to a wider audience research concerned with the significant influences on the quality of mathematics learning taking place in schools. The four essays are: (1) "Influences From Society" (Alan Bishop); (2) "The Socio-cultural Context of Mathematical Thinking: Research Findings and Educational…

A test to be used for placement of students at the University of Texas (UT), Austin, in lower-level courses in Chinese and to award credit-by-examination in some courses was developed, and its validity was tested. Faculty members from the Department of Oriental and African Studies and the Measurement and Evaluation Center of the UT constructed a…

Recent studies refuting the effectiveness of advance organizers in preparing students to comprehend text material have not met the conditions necessary for advance organizers to succeed. According to the assimilation theory, which holds that people learn by chaining what is known to what is to be learned, the following conditions must be met for…

A study investigated the ability of fifth grade above and below average readers to use mental imagery in reading familiar and unfamiliar text. The subjects, 80 fifth grade students reading either above or below grade level, were placed into either an experimental or a control group. All subjects individually read one familiar and one unfamiliar…

The hypothesis for this study assumed that subjects who received a diagram representing the structural relationships of a story would be more likely to solve a new and analogous problem than subjects who received two analogs without a diagram. The 151 graduate students who acted as subjects were randomly assigned to one of four treatments: one or…

Readers need to be encouraged to combine prior knowledge with information gained from the text and then try to predict what will happen later in the text. The overhead projector is a valuable tool for enhancing instruction involving prediction. The process of gradually revealing text to a group of students, eliciting their predictions, evaluating…

This report discusses how reading instruction should be modified to facilitate the development of comprehension strategies in all children (including those labeled as "at-risk" or "disadvantaged"). Current theoretical views of reading comprehension do not support a discrete skills perspective, but classroom research has…