To know the age effects in foreign language learning for children in China, we made both qualitative survey on the English teachers, the students and their parents by means of questionnaire; and quantitative survey on the students' scores from junior 1 to senior 2 (5 years) in the secondary school by analyses between those (over 30 students) who…

Accounting educators struggle with ways to incorporate the development of critical thinking and communication skills into the curriculum. Case analysis is one tool for developing these skills. We examine whether students' case analysis scores improve as a result of participation in peer grading and peer review. We find that students improve their…

The ability to apply existing knowledge in new situations and settings is clearly a vital skill that all students need to develop. Nowhere is this truer than in the rapidly developing world of Web-based learning, which is characterized by non-sequential courses and the absence of an effective cross-subject guidance system. As a result, questions…

Arguing that Mother Goose is becoming an endangered species, this paper reports on the results of an informal survey of undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in a children's literature course. The survey results reported in the paper indicated that some students were able to complete a cloze-type Mother Goose couplet, but others audibly…

This study examined whether familiarity with content influences performance on conditional reasoning problems of the form P implies Q independently of ease of generation of specific examples of "Q and not-P." Results indicated that increased content familiarity resulted in higher performance levels. (Author/JAZ)

The effects of prior knowledge and information orderings on the immediate and delayed recall of unfamiliar information under various levels of control for the effects of cognitive style and reading achievement were studied. Significant interaction effects were discovered. (Author/DF)

Research on the evaluation of World Wide Web sites has already begun, but it is proceeding at a slow rate. The main reasons for this are the attempt to adapt existing methodologies to the particularities of the Web, the individual structure of Webs sites, and the issue of finding the appropriate evaluators. This study addresses these points and…

Prior experience learning often requires new and different kinds of measurement techniques. Methods are described that have been developed to identify and assess the prior experiential learning of adult women from their unpaid work in the home and the community. (Author/PN)

Uses 227 elementary education majors to investigate the effect of past musical training on students' present ability to perform on music achievement test items. Investigates if a difference existed between students with training and those without training, and if a difference existed in the type of training. (Author/AH)

Argues that Piaget's cognitive stage theory complements psycholinguistic theories of fluent reading by clarifying how readers acquire and then use prior knowledge. Suggests that, in this light, teachers may want to rearrange the order and manner in which they present units from basal readers. (FL)

To meet the future's challenges, recommends that community colleges: improve the entry-exit-reentry process, individualize instruction, make open admissions meaningful by combining literacy and occupational education, grant credit for experiential learning, serve as educational brokers, collaborate with community agencies, strengthen student…

Discourse processing involves an interaction of text based processes and prior knowledge. It was shown that college students varied in their relative employment of knowledge-based processes, and that individuals tended to be more "text bound" when they were more "stimulus bound" according to an embedded figures test.…

Presents examples to substantiate the observation that children experiment with and benefit from writing long before they receive formal instruction, and suggests ways for parents and teachers to avoid obstructing this natural and healthy tendency. (HTH)

Argues that acceptance then management of collective knowledge is increasingly important and that individual understanding and views toward the world are less valued. Considers the implications of this perspective for chemistry instruction. (DDR)

The Program on Noncollegiate Sponsored Instruction and the American Council on Education College Credit Recommendation Service are national methods of evaluating programs and granting credit for learning acquired through noncollegiate organizations. (SK)