It is the premise of this study that the performance of black students in math and science is crippled by the interference of their language patterns. It is argued that schoolwork of these students demonstrates how nonstandard English can lead to misunderstanding. The connection between students' misunderstandings of certain quantitative relations…

A theory of how people learn certain procedural skills is presented. It is based on the idea that the teaching and learning that goes on in a classroom is like an ordinary conversation. The speaker (teacher) compresses a non-linear knowledge structure (the target procedure) into a linear sequence of utterances (lessons). The listener (student)…