The characteristics and elements of situated learning are described, along with some approaches that use this perspective. Situated cognition proposes a radically different explanation of learning that conceives of it largely as a social phenomenon rather than a process occurring within the mind of the individual. Situated learning requires…

While humor can backfire or, worse, mask dark, underlying prejudices, research reveals positive and promising connections between humor and creativity, efficiency, and mental health. Although there remains considerable room for disagreement on the essential qualities of humor, several researchers after reviewing the literature appear to have…

This document consists of the first three issues of a newsletter written by the members of the Making Thinking Visible Project. The first newsletter describes collaborative planning as it related to writing, discusses school projects using collaborative planning, presents a dialogue between two students using the process, and compares…

This study addressed the problem of promoting generalization of knowledge in people with mental handicaps, by presenting an approach based on the idea that certain cognitive representations of strategies and related concepts are common to solving a wide variety of problems. The surface context of these problems may vary considerably, but all will…

This review of the literature and annotated bibliography summarizes the available research relating to teaching programming to high school students. It is noted that, while the process of programming a computer could be broken down into five steps--problem definition, algorithm design, code writing, debugging, and documentation--current research…

Using James Britton's model of discourse as a touchstone, this paper develops a theoretical base for writing instruction in adult literacy programs. The paper explores writing from an interactionist perspective that views writing as a complex recursive process in which the writer builds meaning with a text according to the purposes for writing,…

Deals with the provisional grammar known as Learner's Language that foreign language learners develop in the learning process. Data derived from observing Learner's Language have two major implications for foreign language teaching: the reordering of learning sequences, and the need for providing a full communicative context throughout the…

Students write a great deal during their school years, but they apparently never realize that writing affects their lives outside of school and can often even be important to their success. Research on the composing process has enabled teachers to separate the writing process from its product, but theory, practice, and research still focus on the…

The pedagogical strategies of human tutors in problem solving domains are described and the possibility of incorporating these techniques into computerized tutors is examined. GIL (Graphical Instruction in LISP), an intelligent tutoring system for LISP programming, is compared to human tutors teaching the same material in order to identify how the…

This practicum was designed to organize and implement an effective thinking skills program to enhance higher-order thinking in children. The program's goals were (1) to provide a series of in-service training sessions designed to improve participants' teaching skills and motivate participants to use various teaching strategies in order to bring…

A discussion of the English language teaching method of Toru Matsumoto, author of "Thinking in English," reconstructs the instructional principle and presents it for further development. First, the history of English language teaching in Japan is reviewed and Matsumoto's biography is sketched. The salient features of the principle are…

Summarized are the findings from five studies carried out in Australia in 1979-80. First was a cross-sectional survey designed to determine the memory capacity of a population of children in grades 1-3. The second study investigated performance differences on a variety of mathematically related developmental tasks for the same group. Data from…

Noting the lack of definitive information about teaching thinking skills and how they are implemented throughout the year or how they are coordinated among subject areas and articulated along grade levels, this booklet is intended to provide school districts with a successful plan for developing a comprehensive thinking program for grades K-12.…

Students can be introduced to reader-writer relationships with the print world they recognize as most friendly, magazines. Comments concerning the wide range of magazines and the specificity of an individual magazine's audience should arise naturally. Teachers might ask their students to discover what textual features led to their definitions of…

Research on the learner's role as an active participant in the teaching/learning process suggests that modified content instruction holds promise for influencing the development of second language skills. This research indicates that the effectiveness of learning depends on how the student thinks about the new task as well as on the way in which…