This practicum was designed to incorporate critical thinking skills instruction and practice into a fourth-grade curriculum to increase fourth-grade students' ability to recognize and apply critical thinking strategies to appropriate situations. This program concentrated on the increasing of six critical thinking skills: classification, sequence…

This document presents a series of seven notebooks written to assist students at risk of becoming school dropouts due to learning problems. The notebooks explain what learning is, the student's role in the learning process, tools available to learners, how a particular student may learn best, which areas of learning need to be strengthened, and…

How the self-explanation process relates to learning and subsequent problem-solving performance was studied in two experiments with college students to examine whether students taught to self-explain during a study phase show greater test gains than control group counterparts; this is an attempt to replicate the results of M. T. H. Chi and others.…

Different learning strategies that are used by field-independent (FI) and field-dependent (FD) people in a hypermedia-assisted instructional setting were studied with 63 international college students for whom English was a second language. The treatment was a semantic network-based hypermedia-assisted language-learning environment to help…

This book is designed to help teachers maximize their students' learning of Logo. It investigates what students learn when they learn Logo, and how teachers know what they are learning. The book is intended primarily for teachers at the upper elementary and middle school levels. Each chapter is devoted to a critical aspect of Logo learning, and…

Following a brief introduction, five reports, books, and articles that examine the issues of engendering, maintaining, or regaining student motivation are summarized. While some offer specific strategies that can be used at the classroom level, others address issues beyond the classroom, recognizing that schoolwide policies and practices can also…

This study examined the strategies that 12 kindergarten and first-grade French immersion students in Ontario developed for oral communication and the contexts of such communication. Over the course of the school year each student was videotaped once a month in various classroom settings. The transcriptions of student conversations and utterances…

This book offers practical guidelines for implementing cooperative-collaborative learning in the classroom. Included are research reviews, sample lesson plan formats, suggestions for peer coaching, and forms and materials that teachers may duplicate. The book's 17 chapters are divided into three sections on cooperative group learning; partner…

This paper examines the educational needs of rural students and suggests ways that college programs can be adapted to the learning characteristics of rural students. Rural students are likely to be global learners, have a strong preference for cooperation, view learning as a social experience, have an aversion to individual recognition, experience…

Humor can be an effective element of classroom teaching, serving to reduce tension, increase motivation, aid instruction and strengthen teacher/student relationships. A review of the literature reveals that research in this area is incomplete and inconclusive. This study surveys 5th- and 6th-grade teachers (N=50) for information on how they vary…

An ethnographic study was conducted with the goal of evaluating the botanical concepts of sixth-grade students. One aspect of the study involved examination of the levels of abstraction students use for naming plants. Nine sixth-grade students were interviewed individually. Each was asked to identify the plants seen in a set of 64 slides and…

Although there is general acceptance that information presented in formal learning situations must be encoded linguistically by the learner, there is little research on the differential aspects of various types of linguistic encoding strategies. A study sought to determine the differential effects of three linguistic encoding strategies on…

Role play (a dramatic technique in which individuals improvise behaviors that illustrate acts expected of persons involved in defined situations) has several advantages for the classroom. Role play: (1) involves little or no additional instructional costs; (2) allows students to practice behaviors and skills; (3) closes the gap between training…

Learning strategy applications are provided for beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels of English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) instruction. Although designed primarily for high school students, most of the sample lessons can be used equally successfully with older learners, and some lessons are also suitable for younger learners. Chapter 1 of…

This report is the final report of a comparative study of the teaching and learning of writing in the United Kingdom and the United States, consisting of observational studies of 4 pairs of classrooms which exchanged writing between the 2 countries over a 2-year period. Following an overview in chapter 1, chapter 2 describes the study's methods.…