While story grammar and cognitive science theories of stories state or imply that a story will be more interesting if the protagonist experiences difficulty in attaining his or her goal, neither theory considers that the importance of the goal may also affect how interesting the story is. The structural-affect theory, however, defines stories on…

Word processing programs offer five capabilities that can help students over the physical and psychological constraints associated with writing. First, producing text on a word processor is more tentative and more noncommital than producing text on paper. This reassures the writer that it is all right to experiment with words. Second, the blinking…

Centrally concerned with design, educational technology involves making the best possible decisions for action given a particular set of circumstances, with a body of knowledge or instructional theory for guidance. More work is needed to aid educational technologists in the three tasks of building instructional theory, developing techniques for…

Bloom's Taxonomy is reviewed and analyzed in this report; the summative finding being that few educational innovations have had equal impact upon the profession. The taxonomy is first defined with particular attention being paid to "Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain." Various universities' and colleges' use of the taxonomy is described.…

This study concerns children's understanding of spatial relationships and their expression in drawings and photographs. Sixty children (ages 5, 8, and 11) were asked to discriminate and reproduce three types of depth relationships in either drawings or photographs: enclosure, where a larger object is placed directly behind a smaller object;…

A conference in June 1978 brought together approximately 50 faculty from various American universities to discuss issues related to cognitive process instruction. This book contains the papers from that conference, focusing on recent, innovative approaches to cognitive process instruction and recent research studies on thinking skills that have…

This book is directed toward increasing students' ability to analyze problems and comprehend what they read and hear. It outlines and illustrates the methods that good problem solvers use in attacking complex ideas, and provides practice in applying these methods to a variety of questions involving comprehension and reasoning. Chapter I includes a…

This report is a pilot effort to understand how knowledge imformation is effectively imparted in a classroom. The work is built on a study of the cognitions of effective teaching. Expert teachers were identified by monitoring the gain scores of students in classrooms over a 5-year period. All teachers were interviewed, observed, and videotaped…

A task required subjects to make a word-nonword decision to visually presented items--words with a high or low number of meanings or lawful nonwords. Words with several meanings produced shorter decision times, indicating that words with multiple meanings have multiple memory entries. (CHK)

Children aged 2 - 4 were tested to determine the effects of plausibility on comprehension of negative statements. It was found that negatives about an exceptional item in an array, i.e. plausible negatives, were understood before implausible negatives. Other results are described and discussed. (Author/RM)

The nature, essence, and power of thought and speech in Navajo ideology are discussed. Emphasis is given to speech and thought in the context of ritual. (SCC)

Suggests that science teachers provide the student with materials in abundance that are appropriate to his stage of cognition. (LS)

The failure of todays education to develop critical and analytical skills in students is examined. This journal is available from the Department of Philosophy, Jersey City State College, 2039 Kennedy Blvd., Jersey City, New Jersey 07305. (Author/DE)