This paper reports on a project to improve Beginning Algebra students' understanding of basic algebraic concepts through fully integrated use of the TI-83 graphing calculator. The methodology incorporated an intervention case study including approximately 700 Beginning Algebra students at an open-door community college of 8,500 students in the…

Wertsch's clarification of Vygotsky's claims about the role of social interaction in the development of children's thinking made an important contribution to educational research. Revisiting that clarification, I suggest that "talk" instead of "speech" best describes Vygotsky's concern with the functional dynamics of dialogue rather than the…

Prior eye-tracking studies of spoken sentence comprehension have found that the presence of two potential referents, e.g., two frogs, can guide listeners toward a Modifier interpretation of "Put the frog on the napkin..." despite strong lexical biases associated with "Put" that support a Goal interpretation of the temporary ambiguity (Tanenhaus,…

This three-part book, a collection of articles by some of the foremost researchers in language comprehension, examines the thought processes involved in listening to conversation or in reading a page of text. The first part of the book deals with what the reader stores from a page during and after comprehension; it investigates the reader's use of…

This research examines the effects of structure and content variables on memory and comprehension of prose passages. A process model for the comprehension of stories is proposed which assumes that stories are encoded in a hierarchical organizational framework which represents the abstract structural relationships of the plot. The implications of…

Three generic types of information processing (IP) models are considered in this paper. They are: the General Problem Solver, developed by Simon; interactive natural language models exemplified by the work of Weizenbaum, and the quantitative instructional models developed by Atkinson. These were selected primarily because of their potential for…

Examines the effects of text elaboration and imagery on student comprehension in a computer-assisted poetry assignment designed to teach the concept of "mood." Concludes that the computer neither hindered nor elevated comprehension. (EL)

Tabulates the frequency of comprehension question types and teacher questioning behavior and reports that teachers emphasize recall, use several controlling actions in questioning, and miss opportunities for putting questions into clusters which would extend thinking. Bibliography. (MD)

Organization is believed to be related to understanding and memory. Whether this belief was applicable in biochemical education was examined about two years after students had experienced biochemistry classes in their first year. The ability of organizing information in biochemistry was judged from the number of correct links of 886 biochemical…

The present study investigates whether knowledge about the intentional relationship between gesture and speech influences controlled processes when integrating the two modalities at comprehension. Thirty-five adults watched short videos of gesture and speech that conveyed semantically congruous and incongruous information. In half of the videos,…

Through retelling, students can begin to attach sense and meaning to the sometimes complex concepts they encounter in science texts. Also, the shift from silent thinking to verbal expression causes the brain to consolidate and integrate new ideas. As students share information through retelling, they gain new perspectives on the text as they hear…

Two individual differences studies tested relationships between listening comprehension and two conceptualizations of working memory (WM) capacity. Recently, some theorists have stressed that the empirically indicated limits of rehearsal-based WM storage components are inconsistent with the amounts of information needed to accomplish complex…

To assess children's ability to draw inferences from selections of children's literature and to measure the significance of various selected factors to this ability was the problem of this study. Children (432) were evenly divided among grades 4, 5, and 6 and randomly divided at each grade level into two equal groups, one of which read the…

Investigated preschool children's understanding of temporal relationships in terms of their comprehension of sentences containing clauses linked by "before" and "after". Also evaluated was the relative importance of order of mention and main-subordinate relations strategies in children's interpretation of temporal order information. (Author/SDH)

Two experiments were conducted (1) to identify the component processes of language comprehension that draw upon cognitive capacity for their execution, and (2) to determine differences in patterns of resource allocation during integrative processing for good and poor readers. In the first experiment, nine good and nine poor college-age readers…