This article reports on the results of action research conducted in a university ESP classroom in Oman. The impetus for this research was the practitioner's dissatisfaction with the current practice of introducing the grammatical concept of the English passive and its subsequent results. Framed within the sociocultural theory of cognitive…

This collection of 58 articles from the recently-published third edition of the International Encyclopedia of Education focuses on learning, memory, attention, problem solving, concept formation, and language. Learning and cognition is the foundation of cognitive psychology and encompasses many topics including attention, memory, categorization,…

Models of conceptual and language development by Orwell, Piaget, Whorf and Sapir, Vygotsky, and Bruner are reviewed. Their implications for teaching and some individual problem-solving experiments are discussed. (CP)

Considers radical constructivism in light of poststructuralism and hermeneutic phenomenology and shows how this forces a reassertion of the teacher's role in the student's constructing of mathematical knowledge. (48 references) (Author/MKR)

The first of three articles on the ways in which people formulate their observations, this paper considers the basic assumptions of both syntactic and paradigmatic models of cognition and their applications in natural (i.e., human) and artificial (i.e., computer) information processing. The analysis begins with background information on the nature…

The premise that using language is a thinking process is central to the computerized diagnostic test being developed by Educational Testing Service (ETS). The test developers are making a significant educational contribution by describing the reciprocal and dynamic relationship between language and thinking. Reading comprehension has been…

Supported is the argument that cognitive development should not be studied alone, in isolation from wider questions about the history of thought in the scientific community. Interest in the topic resulted from dissatisfaction with British secondary school Language-for-Learning movement assertions that learners' active use of their own speech and…

A theory of the components of verbal intelligence is developed and tested in this series of experiments. After reviewing alternative theoretical frameworks for understanding verbal intelligence, a componential theory of verbal comprehension is proposed. This theory specifies the information-processing components, context cues, and mediating…

Focusing on the acquisition of semantic features and the relation between semantic and perceptual features, this study further tests the "semantic feature hypothesis," where a child acquires full adult word meaning component by component, and its complementary "correlation hypothesis," which claims that the source of these semantic features lies…