An exploration of the linguistic patterns and conversational strategies of adult learners was conducted to clarify the relationship between individuals' oral communicative ability and their levels of proficiency in the nonoral literate modes of reading and writing. The connection between social class and language development was also examined.…

Shows how a contract approach to grading can also enrich and internalize some of the basic principles of an introductory college-level psychology course. Through class activities, students are provided with an arena for embellishing some of the theory and principles learned in class. (Author/JR)

This article analyzes the potential conflict between student evaluations of teaching and higher-level cognitive outputs by reexamining data in existing studies and utilizing rationalistic models of human behavior. The author finds that students favor professors who emphasize lower level cognitive material. (Author/JR)

The factors underlying memory performance in learning are shown to be affected by strategic processing and by automatic processing. Strategic processing is under the conscious control and effort of the learner while automatic processing is dependent on the strength of associations between new concepts and known concepts in a given domain.…

Investigates the cognitive development of a group of counselor education students (N=43) during their training and also assesses the relationship of cognitive development to actual counseling behavior. Results indicate small incremental gains in counselor cognitive functioning over the course of training. Findings suggest a need to emphasize…

Results of a study involving 431 college students suggests that student construct system development plays an influential role in students' evaluation of teachers. As construct differentiation increased, students were increasingly able to separate task from interpersonal relational concerns in their evaluations of teachers. (IAH)

The content of 228 college student's writing samples appears to be a main determiner of how many and what types of preposition errors will appear. These results indicate that preposition errors point to cognitive lags and complex, abstract writing tasks may be the appropriate treatment. (Author/PN)

This document contains papers and transcripts from a university faculty colloquium which shared views about teaching methods and information on successful approaches. Following a copy of the colloquium announcement and a brief introduction, the main section presents transcripts of the presentations. The first discusses the structure and role of…

Two studies examined the effects of different types of imaginal elaborations on recall. In Experiment 1, 6-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and college adults were given 20 word pairs embedded in one of four types of sentences: short plausible, bizarre, personalized, or self-generated. With no mention of a memory test, subjects were asked to use the…

Results of five experiments showed that in certain situations recall varied with processing difficulty for both children and college students. This was primarily due to enhanced cue discriminability. The relation between processing difficulty and developmental increases in recall seemed to be mediated by constructability problems and resource- and…

Adverse effects of material rewards on Wechsler subscale performance may be the result of a reward-produced developmental regression. To further explore that idea through replicating earlier findings with adults, and to extend the enquiry to children, selected Wechsler subscales were administered to 32 subjects at each of three ages (5, 10, and 18…

A serious gap is seen in the literature about student evaluation of teaching: what constitutes teaching effectiveness and quality education? Some possible conflicts are explored between the student evaluation approach and the goal of developing higher level cognitive skills in college students. (MSE)

Compared kindergartners', third graders', and undergraduates' understanding and attribution of randomness. Found that kindergartners' interpretations were deterministic or outside the determinancy-indeterminancy frame. Most third graders had some grasp of randomness; their interpretations were less dominated by false attribution of determinism…

Factors that may affect success in high school or introductory college physics typically include cognitive structure such as formation of problem-solving schemata, visual-spatial abilities, induced cognitive structures of sex roles, and such external factors as teaching style and curriculum. All are important in passing a physics course as…

Although student evaluation of instruction forms are used by colleges to provide information to instructors and administrators, personality and cognitive style variables of the student raters are rarely considered. A cognitive developmental measure, the Paragraph Completion Test (PCT), two cognitive style measures, Bieri's Modified Rep Test and…