Because of recent shifts in understanding the nature of knowledge and the process of learning, there may be major and long-lasting changes in the nature of educational research and its role for educators. Since most people understand through the use of metaphor, a metaphor that previously fostered the understanding of research is the assembly line…

Teaching reading comprehension as a process rather than a product demands new instructional techniques. As the psycholinguistic model of reading suggests, readers use prior knowledge and linguistic competence to confirm, reject, or revise predictions on the text's meaning. Methods increasing readers' consciousness of their role in the…

The "symbol systems approach" to the study of computers in education that is outlined avoids the pitfalls of past media research--particularly research on the effects of television on children's learning and knowledge--and asserts that media can be usefully distinguished in terms of the symbol systems they present and the kinds of…

A faculty development program designed to encourage critical thinking skills across the curriculum at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire is described in this report. The program's goal was to stimulate faculty to add critical thinking to their pedagogical objectives. Faculty participants attended six 4-hour meetings designed to heighten their…

This book, intended for researchers in the psychology of reading and language, college students in psychology and education, teachers of reading, and educators in general, is designed to be used in a course on the psychology of reading or the psychology of language comprehension. The book contains the following chapters: (1) "An Introduction and…

Recognizing a word in a meaningful text involves processes that combine information from many different sources, and both bottom-up processes (such as feature extraction and letter recognition) and top-down processes (contextual information) are thought to interact when skilled readers recognize words. Two similar experiments investigated word…

Procedural documentation is presented for administering, scoring and analyzing data gathered to examine the construct validity of a set of superitems developed to assess student levels of mathematical reasoning ability. Each superitem includes a mathematical situation and a structured set of questions about that situation. The questions were based…

Statistical methods employed to test individual differences in dual-task performance and the existence of a general time-sharing ability are reviewed and critiqued. Specifically, both the types of data being collected and the types of data analysis procedures have been inadequate to the critical evaluation of a hypothetical…

Part of a research project designed to develop a theory of the cognitive processes involved in skilled reading by the analysis of the location and duration of eye fixations, this paper concentrates on how eye fixations can be used to determine when encoding, lexical access, parsing, and integration processes are executed and how they are affected…

Different aspects of human-machine interaction are discussed in the five brief papers that comprise this report. The first paper, "Some Observations on Mental Models," discusses the role of a person's mental model in the interaction with systems. The second paper, "A Psychologist Views Human Processing: Human Errors and Other…

A group of 24 14-year-old students were presented with sets of algebra tasks using the Leeds Modelling System (LMS), a computer-based modeling system. Four months later, these same students were given a paper-and-pencil test which covered comparable tasks set by LMS. In addition, certain students were given detailed diagnostic interviews. A…

This paper reports the results obtained with a group of 24 14-year-old students when presented with a set of algebra tasks by the Leeds Modelling System (LMS). These same students were given a comparable paper-and-pencil test and detailed interviews some 4 months later. The latter studies uncovered several kinds of student misunderstanding that…

The ultimate goal of reading instruction is to develop independent readers. To become independent, students must be in control of their own thinking processes. They must be aware of cognition and the conscious use of metacognitive processes. Instruction in metacognition will help students gain control over their own thought processes. Interaction…

Directed reading activities found in commercially produced instructional materials usually contain information that is aimed at helping children understand the story as well as helping them to develop other skills. To test the effectiveness of both establishing background knowledge and directing children toward central story content, two…

This study used the Montague-Riley Test to introduce a new scoring procedure that revealed errors in cognitive processes occurring at subcomponents of an electricity problem. The test, consisting of four parts with 36 open-ended problems each, was administered to 250 high school students. A computer program, ELTEST, was written applying a…