This paper describes the role of analogy in science instruction and presents new research on the Teaching-With-Analogies model. After an introductory section, the paper discuses learning science meaningfully, including constructing relations, strategies for learning conceptual relations, the definition of analogy, effectiveness of analogies, and…

A teacher educator incorporates active involvement of students and choice in two different college classrooms. The first class was an undergraduate reading/literacy education class. Students were offered the choice of the RAP (Reading Addiction Process) option or taking the final exam. Students read materials of their own choice on a daily basis.…

This book presents an overview of reading/writing research, discussing specific reading/writing processes, instructional issues, teacher research, and directions for future research. Chapter titles are: (1) Alternative Research Perspectives (Sarah J. McCarthey and Taffy E. Raphael); (2) Reading, Writing, and Genre Development (Judith A. Langer);…

An action research project studied the attitudes and achievement of low-achieving fifth-grade students after participating in a 1-year heterogeneously grouped, literature-based reading program. The project explored the changes in student attitudes towards reading, and changes in students' knowledge in comprehension and vocabulary development.…

Knowledge of morphology--the ability to gain information about the meaning, pronunciation, and part of speech of new words from their prefixes, roots, and suffixes--is an important component of skilled reading. As part of a larger program of research on morphology, a study explored the development of students' knowledge of common English suffixes.…

A study examined the relationships of reading achievement and constructs about student literacy activities for four ethnic-gender groups. A secondary analysis of nearly 3,000 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds' reading achievement and student questionnaire data from the 1986 National Assessment of Educational Progress was undertaken. The constructs varied…

A study examined the first year of implementation of a college reading program developed at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. The study consisted of two separate analyses. In analysis 1, the characteristics of students who were required to enroll in the remedial reading program were studied to determine trends and develop profiles for the…

A study examined the relationship between reading instruction and the development of decoding and spelling skills and the writing fluency of children with varying levels of phonemic awareness. First grade children from two classrooms in a rural Florida school district who began school high and low in phonemic awareness received either whole…

Teaching models, derived from theory and research, are static, and lack responsibility. Models substitute an abstracted notion for teachers. Literature can be viewed as a field of play, where meaning opens, rather than as a body of knowledge. The teacher's challenge consists of posing questions that allow students to formulate their takes on a…

Of all cognitive styles, field dependence/independence (FD/I) is by far the most researched and has the greatest application potential to educational problems. Briefly stated, the FD/I dimension refers to people's ability to experience and interpret their environment in terms of a global versus analytic continuum. Field dependents are likely to…

To determine how procedural instructions comprised of text and pictures are comprehended and executed, a research review focused on (1) differences in comprehension and performance attributable to variations in the information's organization, (2) the format of the information, (3) the metacognitive strategies employed by the readers, and (4) the…

During the 1979-80 school year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) surveyed approximately 29,000 nine-year-old students regarding attitudes and achievement in reading and literature. Findings from this study were used for an analysis of the relationship between reading achievement and television viewing. The following…

The assumption that phonological processes support comprehension guided two experiments in manipulating the similarity of the consonant code both within silently read sentences and between these sentences and concurrently vocalized phrases. The first experiment examined whether tongue-twisters would take longer to read than phonetically…

One model of interactive processing useful in describing word identification processes in discourse context is of a weakly interactive type. This type assumes that the time to identify a word in context is an activation function, whereas the time to activate a word in memory beyond some criterial identification threshold is a multiplicative…

Children's books can be used to expand knowledge and increase interest in the content areas. The social understanding that first and second grade students gain from a unit on family relationships and friendships will be richer if literature is an integral part of the instruction. Titles for such a unit might include "Charlotte's Web," by E.B.…