This paper discusses ways that students can better be taught to think. It argues that poor/low-achieving students served by Chapter 1 of the Education Consolidation and Improvement Act of 1981 could genuinely profit from instruction on thinking and that, for maximum impact, such instruction should be introduced as a course in itself, separate from…

A study tested the hypothesis that learning disabled (LD), specifically reading disabled, children differ from "normal" children in their ability to acquire automatic perceptual processes. The subjects were 16 third grade and 15 sixth grade students, of whom 7 third grade and 3 sixth grade students were classified as LD. LaBerge's letter…

A series of six models were devised and tested to address the structure of elementary school achievement in language, work study, reading, and mathematics skills. The models were based on two assumptions: first, that information processing strategies of children would govern their basic skills performances; and, second, that the basic skills would…

A study examined patterns of development in spoken interaction and types of causal thought that might reflect the human capacity to displace, that is, to shift reference from the present moment to another moment in time. Participants were four infants and their parents, who came to a laboratory for one-half hour every 2 weeks from the child's…

Researchers investigating the cerebral information processing of visual stimuli have usually followed the pattern of stimulating the subject's eyes with light and observing accompanying changes in brain wave patterns. Such visually evoked responses (VERs) have been found to discriminate bright from dull children and dyslexic from normal readers.…

Three sets of experiments compared skilled and unskilled college and school age (sixth through eighth grade) readers' processing of spoken and printed sentences in isolation and in story context. The two types of readers differed in their processing of the structural, thematic, and schematic properties of sentences in both reading and listening.…

The "levels effect," the finding that the more central to the meaning of a passage an idea is the more likely that idea is to be retained, does not seem to hold for immediate recognition. Therefore, a study was conducted to test a model of information storage that predicted that when surface structure information was preserved in its…

A study was conducted to verify the findings of previous research showing that a difference in recall of superordinate and subordinate level concepts existed among various reading ability groups within the same grade of elementary school children. Instead of especially constructed passages used in the previous studies, the study used actual…

While each English department will establish its own set of assumptions appropriate for its objectives and programs, the new rhetoric can bring some coherence to the teaching of writing and literature by providing students with reliable strategies for reading literature as well as writing. In teaching literature teachers need to demonstrate the…

For use by teachers in helping students become better writers, this booklet describes and illustrates cognitive mapping, a prewriting technique that helps students combine their verbal and visual skills in order to produce ideas and to plan stories, plays, reports, or essays. The first section of the booklet discusses the interrelations between…

E. Boder and S. Jarrico have developed a test designed to measure the cognitive deficits underlying reading disabilities, which they claim will identify two basic reader subtypes: those with deficits in auditory-linguistic processing skills (dysphonetic) and those with the inability to process visual-spatial information (dyseidetic). To examine…

The Language Arts Test of Cognitive Functioning (LATCF) was investigated to determine if the measure could give specific information about the thinking required for language arts tasks. The LATCF was developed by the author and consists of six anecdotes or tasks that the student must solve or complete. The anecdotes are built on six functions that…

Research indicates that people have two distinct information processing modalities, one for verbal material and one for nonverbal material. The nonverbal mode is used for visual images and is characterized by creative and relatively undisciplined associations. The verbal mode deals with abstract stimuli and is restrained by logic and the need to…

A study tested the hypothesis that educational differences experienced by children from minority and nonmainstream cultural backgrounds are caused by the discrepancy between the expectations, strategies, and schemata used at home and the cognitive and motivational demands of the classroom--a discrepancy not experienced by children from the…

Recent studies in productive phonology among immigrants have supported the case for the existence of a critical or sensitive period in language acquisition. The present study proposes that the case for a sensitive period would be further strengthened by the discovery of comparable age effects for other linguistic abilities such as listening…