Noting that teachers sometimes fail to draw on students' prior knowledge, this guide focuses on helping teachers both to think about the cognitive processes involved in learning and to design activities that provide students with a solid introduction to various learning tasks. The first section briefly discusses current theory and research in…

Recent research into the composing processes of children owes much to Piaget's postulate that cognitive development is linear--that children progress through stages of development whereby tasks are mastered at certain levels of cognitive understanding. The stages of children's writing processes (prewriting, composing, revising), as well as…

This study is the fifth in a series of reports from the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study of students' cognitive processes at one critical point of entry into academic performance. This part of the study examines the ways in which college students interpret and negotiate an assignment that calls for reading to write. Subjects, 17…

Designed to reach a varied audience, this catalog provides concise summaries of some of the major commercial programs that teach thinking, and furnishes descriptions in terms of major goal, target audience, assumptions, process/materials, time, and developer. The first section offers programs primarily intended for teachers, including the…

Reports on a study of the nature of higher order thinking skills employed by high school students as they use information for writing a research paper. The study's objectives, theoretical frameworks, methodology, analysis and findings, and the implications for teaching and librarianship are discussed. (seven references) (KRN)

Prepared by educators, theoreticians, and researchers, the papers in this collection address the connections and interdependencies between writing and cognition. The 24 papers deal with the following topics: (1) rhetoric and romanticism; (2) cognitive immaturity and remedial college writers; (3) current brain research and the composing process;…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 30 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) writing performance and its relationship to the writing attitudes, topic knowledge, and writing goals of college freshmen; (2) representational semantics; (3)…

Reflecting recent insights on the process of learning to read and its relationship to oral language development and writing, the articles in this book provide a range of perspectives, ideas for further empirical investigations in classrooms, extensive reference lists for further reading, and implications for practice throughout a child's…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 27 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) syntax in the writing of learning disabled and normal children; (2) tropes, invention, and the composing process; (3) speaking and writing relationships in…

A study tested the hypothesis that spoken language has a strong direct influence on the encoding process, and that speakers of nonstandard dialects have a different set of problems with the written language and make identifiably different errors than do speakers of standard dialect. The subjects, 13 standard and 13 nonstandard dialect speakers…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 17 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) reasoning strategies used by gifted and average fifth grade children in written discourse; (2) the effect of mode of discourse on the syntactic complexity of…

A study of Head Start preschoolers and families suggests emergent literacy is supported by the Home Based Reading Project, but only when teachers teach parents strategies in simple language, offer a library of quality books, and provide materials highlighting reading practices and effective literacy interactions. Parents play a crucial role in…

This book contains 20 articles, from a wide variety of perspectives, designed to bridge the interests of researchers and teachers on the topic of current composition research. The following articles are included: "Studying the Writing Abilities of a University Freshman Class: Strategies from a Case Study" (Charles R. Cooper, with Roger…

A Computer Tutor for Writers (CTW) was designed to provide procedural facilitation to high school students while they learn the skills and knowledge associated with composition writing. Four previous year-long studies helped identify how to facilitate specific elements of the writing process. The CTW was designed to combine lessons learned from…

Although the relationship between reading and writing proficiency has interested scholars for two centuries, the exact nature of this relationship has resisted discovery. The persistance of statistically significant correlations across a broad range of subjects, measures, and experimental settings leaves no doubt that a moderate link between…