This paper examines the role of learner motivation--elements that arouse, sustain, and direct behavior--as the pivotal factor in education, and urges researchers to consider the motivational state of the individual learner in interaction with the instructional method. It is emphasized that a thorough understanding of the learner's personality, as…

This study sought to determine if 17 affective variables on the Canfield Learning Styles Inventory Form S-A would discriminate among teaching areas of Mississippi public school teachers. The learning style inventory was administered to 86 teachers grouped into four teaching areas: elementary, secondary, special education, and others (library…

Writing is an act of self construction. Considering how students process information can improve the quality of instruction in composing courses, but only if quantifiable, verified models of cognitive functions are taken to heart and applied to teaching methods in the classroom. C. G. Jung's model of the four functions (thinking, sensation,…

Although metamemory has recently received renewed interest by several investigators, individual differences in memory skills have received little if any attention. While individual differences in memory skills have common sense validity, these differences have been difficult to document experimentally. This study used a repeated measures design to…

The purpose of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) Learning Style Profile is to provide educators with a well-validated and easy-to-use instrument for diagnosing the cognitive styles, perceptual response tendencies, and study/instructional preferences of middle level and senior high school students. The Learning Style…

Deductive reasoning problems were presented to 72 public elementary school students, half of whom were identified as gifted (mean age of 9.6 years) and half of whom were regular education students (mean age of 9.3 years). They were used to test an hypothesis that gifted children who score significantly higher than average on standardized…

One of the most consistent findings of research on discourse is that important text information is better learned than less important information because readers devote more attention to the important information. There is now very good reason to believe that questions cause readers to attend selectively to question-relevant information and that a…

Goodenough's (1976) findings on field dependence/independence are extended here by focusing on the information processing stages of attention, encoding in short term and working memories, and storage and retrieval processes of long term memory. The reviewed research indicates that field independent and dependent individuals differ in the ability…

This paper is the second of a series of three which attempt to integrate categories of description aimed at characterizing the experience of learning in terms of the logical relationships that exist between them. The description of the qualitatively different ways in which various aspects of reality are experienced and conceptualized, and the…

Recent discussions of sex differences in intellectual abilities concur that such cognitive sex differences are statistically reliable yet small. To examine the variables of anxiety, rigidity, and divergent production, and to demonstrate that meaningful interactions involving the sex variable may be revealed when there are no "simple" sex…

Middle aged women who have previously been occupied with family and community activities often experience increased role stress when they begin to invest more time and energy in their work roles. To compare coping styles women use to adjust to job changes, 71 women, aged 30-62, who had changed jobs within a 3-year interval were classified into…

The Maryland career course is a one-credit career planning course for undecided undergraduates based on William Perry's (1970) model of intellectual and ethical development. The Perry model can be described using four major and sometimes overlapping divisions which represent a series of positions on learning, i.e., Dualism, Multiplicity,…

This review of the relationship between experiential education and intellectual development/academic learning is organized as follows: first, the theoretical arguments are presented, followed by a review of recent related research. It focuses primarily on experiential education for secondary students, though research on college-level programs is…

Although it has been suggested that women are less likely than men to use cardinality in dealing with environmental space, there has been no direct empirical assessment of this claim. If women are less likely than men to use cardinality, it is not clear whether women lack the competence to use a coordinate system of reference or simply prefer…

Carl Jung's theory of type states that much seemingly chance variation in human behavior results, not from chance, but from basic differences in human functioning. This theory is divided into two major components: fundamental human attitudes (extroversion, introversion) and basic mental processes (sensation, intuition, thinking, feeling).…