A case study of a young boy's learning to read and write from the beginnings of literacy at age 5 up to age 11, after reading and writing have converged, is the focus of this book. The first part of the book, a description of his learning to write, discusses invented spelling, research about other young spellers and writers, the shift toward…

This study investigated the possible contribution of pictures serving a representation function to the recall and retention of information presented in written prose passages. The primary variable considered was the durability of picture effects; a second variable concerned the potential effect the presence of pictures had on the recall of…

Psychological theories have long had a pronounced effect on the diagnosis and instruction of children with learning problems. Traditional theorists emphasized the centrality of global processes assumed to be common to most if not all cognitive tasks. These processes were quite distant from those involved in traditional academic activities, making…

The issue of whose "facts" and whose perspective will control classroom discussions of social questions tends to surface in one of two related ways: (1) in connection with efforts to mandate the content of the instructional matter, and (2) in connection with attacks on teachers whose instructional material contains facts or evaluations offensive…

This report addresses the relationship between education and creativity in Japan, with a focus on four issues. First, the definition and measurement of creativity is discussed. Approaches to the measurement of creativity are presented and criticized, and different meanings of creativity (i.e., originality, deviation from the group,…

The central objective of this study was to determine the effects of formal training in the use and types of questions and in the nature and use of algorithms on middle school students' achievement in economic geography. Subjects were 190 eighth grade students in a large metropolitan school district. Three experimental groups received either: (1)…

The proceedings of the fourth colloquium of the Groupe de recherche en didartique des langues (Language Teaching Research Group) include eleven papers and four synopses. The papers, three in English (E) and the rest in French (F), cover these topics: cognitive presence in language teaching/learning (F); interlanguage and metalanguage (F);…

Three techniques have been found to be helpful in using dramatic techniques to provide motivation, self-confidence, and self-esteem to students of English as a second language at Hostos Community College. Strategic interaction is a technique based on the open-ended scenario, in which students are free to respond to the problem presented in the…

Research suggests that assimilative motivation is largely responsible for the development of native-like speech in both first and second languages. Analysis of anecdotal evidence of early bilingual development, studies of dialect acquisition, bilingual immersion programs, and studies of language pidginization illustrating the development of…

The reward structure of a classroom refers to the means by which a teacher motivates students to perform school tasks. This document reports on a study in which academic achievement in competitive and reward-structured environments was examined in two high school sophomore level biology classes of equal academic ability. Each class was pretested…

Forty-eight college students participated in a study that (1) explored the degree to which the reader response technique developed by W. F. Brewer and E. H. Lichtenstein to study artificial texts could be applied to natural texts, and (2) compared texts written over a wide time period and from two different literary traditions (six American and…

Predicated on the assumption that many of the problems exhibited by learning disabled children arise from difficulties they have in processing information, the program of research described in this paper was undertaken to (1) identify reading comprehension difficulties that are due to disorders in the reader, and (2) design and test effective…

The realization that the areas of second language and mathematics education share some common features and that educators in these fields may profit by an exposure to research and practice in both fields motivated the production of this paper. From an introduction to the literature, parallels in the history of the two disciplines were recognized:…

Two studies examined the effects of writing on subject learning. For the first study, 322 ninth and eleventh grade students read passages from high school social studies and science texts and engaged in six writing-to-study conditions. Students who wrote essays scored lower on immediate topic knowledge posttests, while the students who used study…

Reflecting the influence of James Britton in the field of language and learning, this book--a collection of essays by researchers and practitioners in the area of language and learning--focuses on recent issues of language development in learning. The book contains the following 27 essays: (1) "Social Interaction as Scaffold: The Power and…