This report describes a study that investigated the relationship between the learning process and teaching at the university level. Specifically, the study sought to answer three questions: (1) What is a fruitful way of observing and describing knowledge? (2) How can study skill be observed and described? and (3) How can study skill be influenced?…

Piaget's theory of cognitive development is explained, especially in relation to the teaching of elementary school science. Several research projects involving Piaget's theories are reviewed. (MLH)

This study undertook to reconcile the views of cognitive and behavioral learning theorists on the issue whether learning without awareness (LWA) is possible, and if so, the circumstances under which it occurs. In Study One, two reinforcement procedures were compared in a structured verbal conditioning task. Study Two was a replication of Study…

The deep structure description of a sentence marks the actual grammatical relationships that exist among the words. It is in the deep structure that "meaning" is rendered. Two sentences that are marked differently in deep structure might give rise to the same description in surface structure. Three experiments examined the "psychological reality"…

The study was designed to investigate the effects on immediate acquisition, retention and transfer of two methods of presenting selected geometry concepts to sixth grade students. The effects of immediate acquisition and of transfer were measured immediately after presenting the lessons. The effects of retention were measured 1, 11, and 21 days…

(1) What is learned in a particular subject matter? (2) Who learns it? (3) How does competence develop? (4) And how is learning assessed and optimized? These are the questions asked and answered in this essay. (1) The relationships between units of learning establish the subject matter structures that are learned; e.g., concepts, rules,…

Presented in this paper are findings from research and clinical work conducted over the past seven years that support the following conclusions: "Labels are Useless," which discusses the research in relation to using labels to identify children and concludes that the issue is not the accuracy of the labels--a label is as accurate as its definition…

An introduction to instructional strategies is offered. The author uses the term to refer to prescriptive rules for designing instructional events which create the learning experiences for the mastery of behavioral objectives. The intention is to familiarize the reader with properties of behavior to which instructional events must be responsive…

This study examines the correspondence between a representation of subject-matter structure and a representation of the cognitive structure in students as a result of instruction. Eighty-seven eighth-grade students were assigned randomly to experimental and control treatments. The experimental students (N = 43) studied from a programmed text on…

The role of negative instances in the acquisition of the mathematical concepts of distributivity and homomorphism was examined. Two treatment levels for distributivity (positive instances and positive and negative instances) and the same treatment levels for homomorphism were crossed to form a 2 x 2 factorial design with 23 subjects per cell.…

This study was concerned with identification of elementary school grade levels appropriate for teaching various phases of the metric system. The same unit was taught to 201 elementary school children in grades three through six. Pretests and posttests were used to assess progress made by students in developing skills and understandings related to…

Most current information processing theories of cognition and memory share one common feature: the structure (state-space) of memory is fixed and retrieval from memory involves searching through that structure. Learning, where it is treated at all, involves transforming one such structure into another. This form of representation is questioned and…

To determine the effects of the amount and type of information supplied by a concept definition, fourth and eighth graders were presented with one of two definitions: a "technical" definition which precisely specified all defining attributes of the concept, and a "common usage" definition from a children's dictionary which did not specify all…

An observational study is described, not yet completed, of learning in school classrooms. Observations were made in a number of classes ranging from grade 1 to grade 12, including teaching in a variety of school subjects. The purpose of the study was to explore and refine a method for observing the events which support (or fail to support)…

The document describes a sub-proposal which became a part of the Fox Valley Technical Institute's attempt to identify learning styles and their relationship to learning experiences in vocational-technical education. The sub-proposal consisted of the identification of a sub-set of learning styles and a determination of their relationship with the…