This paper examines basic skills competencies developed by Mexican immigrant adult learners through participation in (although not always completion of) adult basic education programs conducted by the Mexican, Instituto Nacional para la Educacion de los Adultos (INEA). The comparison provides the conceptual basis for configuring instructional…

This teacher resource book, designed to encourage student interest and build learning across the curriculum in grades K-5, is based on the theme of animals. Resource lists and activities in the book focus on the following sections: (1) animals as pets; (2) animals on the farm; (3) animals in the woods; and (4) animals in the wild. Each section…

Reflecting dramatic changes in educators' understanding of literacy, this book, a revision of an earlier text published in 1986 under the title, "Improving Reading Comprehension," provides support for preservice and inservice teachers in learning to help children develop literacy effectively. The central feature of the book is a literacy program…

This paper describes two prospective English teachers' beliefs and understandings regarding literature and the teaching of literature. Through extensive interviews that included context-specific tasks, the study explored the subjects' prior experiences with literature, their conceptions regarding the nature of literature, and their perceptions of…

In most elementary schools in the United States, students get their first systematic introduction to history as a discipline and to chronological treatment of U.S. history as subject matter in fifth-grade U.S. history courses. To develop information about the knowledge and misconceptions concerning U.S. history that fifth-grade teachers can expect…

In the 1960s, credit-by-examination was promoted as a way to broaden access to college. In 1971, Ewald Nyquist, Commissioner of Education in the Regents system of New York, proposed that the Educational Testing Service offer a degree based entirely on performance on examinations. Although a few institutions theoretically offer such degrees, in…

This study examined recent (1995-1998) education students' exposure to a variety of instructional technologies prior to taking a required instructional technology course. The purpose was to identify how frequently students had used various technologies before entering the required course and to identify longitudinal changes and/or trends in…

Using a newspaper article about a ceremony marking the retirement of baseball player Tom Seaver's uniform number, a study examined: (1) the effects of knowledge of baseball in general and of the career of Tom Seaver in particular; and (2) the effects of knowledge of word meanings in general and of words used in the passage specifically on 10th…

This study compared the reading comprehension abilities of learning disabled (LD) students with the performance of both their age-peers and their reading-level peers. Subjects were 16 seventh- and eighth-grade LD students, 16 normal achieving eighth graders, and 16 normal achieving fifth graders. To assess the use of prior knowledge under varying…

This booklet explains the operation of New Zealand's National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and its relationship to workplace assessment. Discussed first is the NQF's mission of encouraging people to continue their education and training after secondary school and permitting flexibility in where and how people train. The role of the NQF in…

This study was conducted to examine the influences of prior school experience on student teachers' thinking. It includes descriptions of students' prior school experiences and an intervention in which students were asked to reflect on and re-evaluate those experiences. Beliefs about education, learning, self worth, abilities, and the development…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether different types of practice strategies are equally effective in facilitating encoding strategies and in subsequent information acquisition and retrieval by students identified as possessing high, medium, and low prior knowledge levels in a content area. Within the context of the…

The third in a series of volumes of curriculum essays on the concepts, issues, and strategies of community development education and training is presented. Five sections with 20 papers are as follows: (1) introduction: theories, definitions, and origins of experiential education--"Experiential Education for Community Development" (I. Harris, P.…

The monograph provides a systematic explication of the underlying standards and principles that have been developed to help adult learners articulate what they know and can do, to clarify their claims to creditable achievement, to help assessors improve the reliability of assessment, and to save assessor time. Ten academic and administrative…

Using 33 college freshmen enrolled in a basic reading skills course as subjects, a study was conducted for two purposes: (1) to determine the effects of direct exposure to the topics of the selections in the New Jersey College Basic Skills Placement Test (NJCBSPT) on their posttest scores, and (2) to investigate whether students exposed to the…