Within child language acquisition research, there has been a fair amount of controversy regarding children's knowledge of the grammatical properties associated with verbal inflection (e.g., tense, agreement, and aspect). Some researchers have proposed that the child's early grammar is fundamentally different from the adult grammar, whereas others…

Rule-breaking behaviour of students is a common disciplinary problem in schools. Employing the constitutive perspective, which posits that every social phenomenon is co-produced by several constitutive units in a COREL (constitutive interrelational) set, this article presents the findings of a qualitative study of the phenomenon. Eleven…

This report described and analyzed different methods for constructing a student's cognitive map in order to study the development and use of domain-specific prior knowledge. Cognitive maps provide accounts of student trajectories over courses and individual or group profiles of learners' strengths and weaknesses at the course or multicourse level.…

This ERIC Digest discusses concept mapping, a technique for representing the structure of information visually. Concept mapping can be used to brainstorm, design complex structures, communicate complex ideas, aid learning by explicitly integrating new and old knowledge, and assess understanding or diagnose misunderstanding. Visual representation…

This paper provides a rationale for the selection of illustrations and visual aids for the classroom. The theories that describe the processing of visuals are dual coding theory and cue summation theory. Concept attainment theory offers a basis for selecting which cues are relevant for any learning task which includes a component of identification…

The major purpose of the present experiment was to assess the impact of student-generated and expert-generated knowledge maps on the effectiveness of post-organizer construction, initial acquisition, and transfer. Sixty students at the University of Missouri-Rolla were included in this study. Participants were required to study a passage and…

A study introduced elementary school students to concept maps--visual representations of a learner's thought processes. Nine teachers with two classes each (kindergarten through fourth grades represented) were taught the terminology of the concept map and were asked to initiate a number of activities in generating concept maps with their children.…

Environmental psychologists are interested in the cognitive processes involved in mental maps. Multidimensional scaling was used to examine the geographic placement of buildings and their perceived attributes by undergraduate and graduate students, and by faculty and staff of a university (N=30). Nine college buildings were selected. Subjects…

This paper examines the gap between the learning potentials that computers provide and the actual impact of computer use on learning and development. It is argued that the computer's unique potential is derived in part from four basic attributes: information, symbol systems, user activities, and relations with the user. It is hypothesized that…

Describes the "Competition Model" (Bates and MacWhinney, 1982) dealing with second-language sentence processing by bilinguals and research that has further developed theories dealing with the model. (CB)

Notes that many students lack the skills necessary for the efficient memorization of content information as well as awareness of appropriate rehearsal strategies or metacognitive skills. Discusses several rehearsal strategies, and concentrates on one--study mapping. (FL)

Assesses the hazards of models of cognitive development and the positivist views of language that support them. Considers how alternative views of language and learning can help develop a method of teaching that views reading and writing as interpretation and the making of meaning. (RBW)

Explores cognitive mapping as a strategy for understanding school people's ideas about school restructuring, describing a study of mapping restructuring and illustrating it with two teachers' cognitive maps about how the process of restructuring should occur. The paper also discusses the implications of cognitive mapping for school restructuring…

Cognitive simulations are runnable computer programs for modeling human cognitive activities. A case study is reported where expert systems were used as a formalism for modeling metacognitive processes in a seminar. Building cognitive simulations engages intensive introspection, ownership and meaning making in learners who build them. (Author/AEF)

Describes the Thinking Network approach and the cognitive mapping strategy used in a rural Mississippi school district to increase students' content acquisition and theme conceptualization of textbook units. Notes that the district's pass rate for state-mandated written communication, reading comprehension, and written essay tests dramatically…