An ethnographic study of a Philadelphia elementary school program in English as a second language focused on the way children's first and second languages were used in the classroom, and how this use of language was connected to the learning process. It was found that despite teachers' claims of emphasis on communication skills, a number of…

Research on content area reading in English as a second language (ESL) has focused on the psycholinguistic and educational aspects of reading. Psycholinguistic research has found that reading comprehension is not solely a result of text variables such as sentence complexity and length or vocabulary, but is largely dependent on reader variables,…

Because of recent shifts in understanding the nature of knowledge and the process of learning, there may be major and long-lasting changes in the nature of educational research and its role for educators. Since most people understand through the use of metaphor, a metaphor that previously fostered the understanding of research is the assembly line…

Some science educators who are interested in conceptual development have considered the phenomenon of student misconceptions and alternative frameworks. Researchers have used a variety of terms to describe the situation in which students' ideas differ from those of a scientist about a particular concept. This digest was produced to briefly…

This newsletter describes an ongoing empirical field study involving a description and analysis of practical teaching situations aimed at describing the content and structure of pupils' frames of reference. The project takes the form of a series of case studies in classes of the 3-year lines of upper secondary schools in Sweden. The study seeks to…

This paper suggests that the teaching of world history from a U.S. and European history viewpoint does not help students understand and develop insights about the contemporary world. The context within which current events occur is more important than simply teaching about specific facts. The process of learning must be considered along with…

The way in which sources of information are perceived in the classroom, in this case by American Indian and Afro-American students, greatly influences the learning process, for the perception determines both the amount of mental effort or cognitive engagement the student decides to invest and the cognitive processes used. Perceptions are…

This paper offers a comprehensive approach to creating a data base on learning to teach. It is organized chronologically around a learning-to-teach continuum. The first section deals with the pretraining phase, before prospective teachers even realize they are learning things that will shape their future teaching. The second section looks at the…

This paper discusses ways in which the innate act of "telling" can be used in teaching to strengthen the bond between teacher and student and enrich the process of learning. The paper offers an intuitive rationale for using "telling" as a teaching mode in the community college classroom and provides a formal explanation of "telling" based on the…

This document focuses on evidence from problem solving case studies which indicate that analogy, extreme case analogies, and physical intuition can play an important role as forms of nonformal reasoning in scientific thinking. Two examples of nonformal reasoning are examined in greater detail from 10 case studies of "expert" problem solving.…

The question of whether performance measures may be more accurate than examination methods to assess an individual's abilities and knowledge is examined, based on a literature review. An information processing view that focuses on the internal activities of thinking and the relationship to external stimuli is considered. Information processing…

Three workshops conducted by consultants will help faculty members at Midway College in Lexington, Kentucky, incorporate effective writing instruction in the content areas. The first workshop will stress the importance of reading and writing to the learning process and provide concrete exercises that demonstrate how writing can be used to generate…

The study, involving 53 students from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, investigated the relevance of certain aptitude-by-treatment interaction findings with normally hearing students to the instruction of hearing impaired students. Instructional variables investigated were classroom structure and student participation. Student…

In a study to explore cognitive growth related to repeated listening to a story, the following questions were considered: (1) Do first grade students' recall ability and comprehension improve with repeated oral retellings of a story? (2) Is the students' recall ability related to their comprehension ability? and (3) Do the patterns of recall…

Intended for those who want to understand the nature of listening in the communication process and for students who wish to understand and improve their own behaviors as listeners, this book draws upon theory and research in the field of listening as well as from a variety of other disciplines. The 10 chapters of the book discuss the following…