The literature on the verbal behavior of teachers and their methods of testing students was reviewed. Studies included those on structuring (focusing attention on the topic), soliciting (including questions, commands, imperatives, and requests), responding (answering questions), and reacting (clarifying, synthesizing, expanding, or making positive…

The concept of "structured programming" was developed to facilitate software production, but it has not carried over to documentation design. Two concepts of structure are relevant to user documentation for computer programs. The first is based on programming techniques that emphasize decomposition of tasks into discrete modules, while the second…

A study explored children's notions of what stories and reports are, how they can be organized, and when to use them, as revealed in the stories and reports they wrote or recalled and in their responses to questions about each. Sixty-seven high achieving children in grades three, six, and nine read and wrote similar kinds of stories and reports.…

Explanations for memory development have tended to focus on acquistion of general strategies and metaknowledge. Recently, emphasis has been given to the knowledge base as a whole, including general world-knowledge and domain-specific knowledge and procedures. Evidence is presented from the memory development literature showing why strategies and…

This essay, the concluding section of a larger study, examines the present state of cognitive science and instructional theory as reflected in the study's earlier chapters. Cognitive analyses of tasks are reported in the broad domain of language comprehension and production (e.g., understanding, composing, and answering questions about texts). The…

Research has suggested that the two hemispheres of the brain serve specialized functions, with the most recent studies portraying the left hemisphere as processing information in a linear, serial, or sequential manner and the right hemisphere as processing information in a holistic, concrete, or visual mode. Although few systematic studies have…

This book is intended to give teachers and student teachers a better understanding of the thinking of adolescent students in science lessons and to indicate the difficulties such students have in understanding the more abstract or formal ideas with which they are presented. It is practical in its orientation as the issues discussed are illustrated…

A study was conducted to investigate the relationship between the intellectual maturity of college students and evidence of rhetorical maturity in their writing--specifically, why some students write better than others, since general language abilities cannot account for all the differences between good and poor writing. By focusing on college…

Provides some background from the biological and behavioral sciences relevant to the education of young children. The author concludes that experience gained by age 8 (particularly during the years 0 to 5) matters for the rest of an individual's life. (PEB)

Proposes a self-instructional strategy training paradigm designed to explicitly teach that the use of heuristic processes and mediational devices can be employed to compensate for age-associated deficits, such as poor problem solving. Format for the procedure was derived from the developmental research of the Soviet psychologists Vygotsky and…

The effects of negative instances on the acquisition of the mathematical concepts of commutativity and associativity were examined. Also investigated were possible transfer effects that might result from the use of negative instances. For 64 ninth-grade subjects, results favored the treatments containing mixed instances and supported the transfer…

Using reading models interchangeably with reading theories blurs the distinction between models as representations and theories as explanations. This report presents several models of reading comprehension and compares the functional purposes and research implications of selecting one model over another. The report draws the following conclusions:…