Reports a study of the influence of prior experiences on traditional and nontraditional preservice teachers' personal constructs of teaching and pedagogical development. Results of anthropological, stimulated recall, and concept map think-aloud interviews revealed many categories of prior experiences that significantly influenced preservice…

Moving beyond question of whether on-line education is beneficial or harmful, explores conditions under which one or another of six instructional methods lecture, collaborative learning, experiential learning, learning contracts, televised courses, and Web-based learning work best. Finds specific methods more appropriate for some subject matters,…

Mainland China has a highly centralised curriculum development system. A study of two schools in northeast China, one in a rural area and the other in an urban area, indicates that the primary mathematics curriculum has been widely adopted by teachers at the classroom level. Feeling the intense pressure generated by the national mathematics…

This article reports on findings from research aimed at examining new teachers' change over the first two years of teaching through their own perceptions, the perceptions of their students and analyses of the school culture in which they worked. Overall, a general pattern was found: most teachers developed according to a narrow, individual and…

This paper asserts that a mixture of creative movement and children's literature should be used to facilitate children's interest in literature and reading. It is argued that the integration of literature and movement into the educational environment could help lower the degree of illiteracy and ease the growing obesity and other health-related…

This paper examines cognitive processing problems associated with attention deficit disorders (ADD) and their relationship to learning disabilities in elementary and secondary students. Children with ADD, medicated (N=20) and unmedicated (N=21), were compared on the Raven test of Progressive Matrices and other tests with children who had been…

While individualized learning strategies typically provide large amounts of instructional support, they also reply heavily on learner judgement to determine the amount of support required to achieve an objective. Frequently, these strategies result in high achievers selecting too much support and low achievers selecting too little. Interest in…

This paper reviews several studies on aptitude treatment interaction, the interaction between the learners' individual differences and methods of instruction. Specifically, it investigates the relationship between previous knowledge, including previously held misconceptions, and instructional methods. It is suggested that significant interactions…

This paper discusses the relationship between individual differences and educational practices by reviewing the historical models of teaching and past research on learner characteristics. The mental testing movement is reviewed in terms of the emergence of aptitude as a measurable concept. Learner motivation is also discussed along with the…

The Children's Personality Questionnaire (CPQ) was administered to 23 academically handicapped children (mean IQ, 79) and 35 academically gifted students (mean IQ, 147). The CPQ measures 14 distinct personality factors; data on these variables were analyzed using a 2 x 2 (academic ability x sex) analysis of variance design. A stepwise discriminant…

Over 150 teachers from five western-central states completed questionnaires on their experiences with individualized reading (IR). Most of the respondents were familiar with IR and had used it at least limitedly in their classrooms. They praised IR's advantages as generating greater student interest, allowing for self-paced progress, and…

This document is an English-language abstract (approximately 1,500 words) of a book which purposes to elucidate the connection between the development of pupils and their assimilation of knowledge and habits in the experimental grades of a new system of elementary education. Various methods of investigation were used: observation during lessons,…

Responds to Barry Brummett's criticism of a previous article by the author suggesting techniques for dealing with fundamentalist Christian students in speech classes. Considers the merits of Brummett's counter proposal and suggests that public speaking courses should not aim to convert absolutist students to relativism but teach them to adapt…

Discuses three perspectives on literature about children classified as severely subnormal for educational purposes: perceptual motor theories, behavior modification interpretation, and Laban movement. Descriptions of each include investigations, administration, adult participants, observation schedules, teaching processes, and data gathering…

Practical suggestions for working with reluctant, unmotivated students as presented through the acronym "STUDENTS" are given as a guide for increasing classroom participation. STUDENTS stands for: success; tolerance; understanding; directions; expectations; negotiations; tasks; and stimulation. (Author/CB)