Neurologist and middle school teacher Judy Willis connects what you do in the classroom to what happens in the brain when students learn how to read, including: (1) Why a classroom has to be safe and supportive in order to overcome barriers to reading fluency; (2) How to jumpstart students who are not well prepared for reading with activities that…

Determining students' knowledge structure is important for assessing what a learner knows about a domain of knowledge. Traditional assessment methods are not always appropriate for exploring students' knowledge structure and changes during the learning period. This study investigates how the existing knowledge structure of the learners interacts…

This study explores the mathematical problem-solving process of trainee teachers in a teachers' training institute. This research adopts a constructivist perspective that views learning mathematics as a process of constructing meaningful representation and knowledge as being constructed by the individual. The research methodology employs the case…

This study examined a Thai biology teacher's creative tensions when she was challenged to adopt a new teaching approach to photosynthesis with her class. The teacher was purposively selected on her need of professional growth. Data from observations and interviews documented the tensions. The data indicated that the biology teacher experienced…

In this study, 364 first-year physics students were randomly assigned to one of four online multimedia treatments on Newton's First and Second Laws of Motion: (1) the "Exposition", a concise lecture-style presentation; (2) the "Extended Exposition", the Exposition with additional interesting information; (3) the "Refutation", the Exposition with…

The purpose of this study was to describe a group of fifth grade students as they engaged in process drama during their social studies class. The author found that students who engaged in process drama learned to combine texts to understand and create new texts. As they became engaged in the material, students collaborated with each other and…

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.…