New knowledge is made meaningful by relating it to prior knowledge. Although meaningfulness usually relates new knowledge to prior superordinate knowledge, arbitrarily meaningful knowledge, coordinate, subordinate, and analogic ideas, experiential knowledge, and cognitive strategy also facilitate learning. Optimization of prior knowledge is done…

The central problem that American education poses for society is that the enterprise is appreciably underproductive when judged against standards and requirements of the postindustrial era. This generic problem will not be appreciably ameliorated until the instructional system design (ISD) process is better understood and explicated and then made…

The task of the conference reported here was to exchange ideas about approaches taken to social science content in the new curricula. The hope was to contribute to the improvement of the large and growing amount of academically based curriculum work through interdisciplinary exposure. The major emphasis was on cognitive content and its…