This paper examines the notion of teacher beliefs as complex ideological systems which have a bearing on actions. The focus is on the beliefs that students bring into their formal teacher education program, which are based on their predominantly authoritarian and didactic schooling experience. These students enter teacher education with…

Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and eighteenth century essayist, offered an important piece of advice to writers--talk to yourself. Some composition texts still recommend various forms of internal dialogue as a means of constructing prophetic argument or internalizing a critical voice, but current instructional emphasis has…

The potential influence of cognitive-behavioral theory on counselor preparation is an important aspect to consider in training counselors and therapists. To determine the effects of self-instruction and the knowledge of how to develop a clinical hypothesis on master's degree counselor trainees, two studies were conducted. In the first study, entry…

This study investigates the validity of the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale-Fourth Edition (S-B:4) for use with students with learning disabilities. It compares the performance of 18 elementary-age students on the S-B:4 and the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K-ABC). The subjects were identified by their school as having learning…

Unlike the linear, serial process of reading books, learning to "read" television is a parallel process in which multiple pieces of information are simultaneously received. Perceiving images, only one aspect of understanding television, requires the concurrent processing of information that is compounded within a symbol system. The…

Characteristics of successful and unsuccessful problem solvers in categorization tasks are examined in this study of undergraduate students. Findings are reviewed of the categorization and solution tasks undertaken by a group (N=21) of science majors at a private university. The subjects were classified as either successful or unsuccessful in…

This research explored how student teachers learn to teach and how they orient themselves to the processes of professional learning. A group of ten primary-grade student teachers were followed through a one-year post-graduate teacher training course, focusing primarily on the one-term field experience that occurred in the middle of the year. The…

A study explored whether socioeconomic status (SES) differences could be detected in 3-month-old infants' differential vocal responsiveness (DVR) to mothers versus strangers. The study also explored whether 3-month-olds' DVR was related to environmental variables, such as the mother's behaviors toward the infant in naturalistic conditions, the…

Research on teacher thinking has established a place for itself within the international educational research enterprise. What is not so clear is how studies of teacher thinking may be of use in improving the quality of teacher preparation programs. This paper promotes a consultant role for researchers on teacher thinking in relation to teacher…

Cognitive science is briefly reviewed, and its implications for instructional design are discussed. The application of cognitive science to instruction requires knowledge of cognitive science, the subject content taught, and the system in which the instruction is imbedded. The central concept of cognitive science is mental representation--the…

Reviews of relevant research on the application of operations research and statistics that appeared prior to 1980 are compared with those appearing in the early 1980s. In summary, both explicit and implicit users of mathematics in educational administration see it as a tool that essentially brings order and generalizability to administrative data.…

This report discusses the importance of presenting qualitative, causally consistent models in the initial stages of learning so that students can gain an understanding of basic electrical circuit concepts and principles that builds on their preexisting ways of reasoning about physical phenomena, and it argues that tutoring environments must help…

This resarch identified K-6 children's (N=1202) and teachers' (N=54) perceptions of what constitutes doing or using mathematics. Perceptions were documented by a questionnaire which included items reflecting the six major strands of the K-6 syllabi and explicit and implicit use of numbers and operations as both facilitating and distracting…

This investigation of the impact of feedback upon scrambled discourse was intended to show the effects of idiosyncratic processing and to provide a more sensitive indicator of feedback usefulness. Learner schemata, text organization, and feedback strategies interact in processing discourse, although past research has favored limited models…

The purpose of this resarch was to develop a model of verbal information processing for use in subsequent analyses of the construct and predictive validity of the current Department of Defense military selection and classification battery, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) 8/9/10. The theory and research methods of selected…