The Personal Adult Learning Lab, part of the Georgia Center for continuing Education, was established to (1) provide the type of learning environment that can support adult learners in their efforts to develop and direct their own learning projects and (2) enable researchers to learn more about the nature of self-directed learning as demonstrated…

In an effort to understand why pictures are used to supplement learning material, a study explored (1) the role of humor in recall, and (2) whether the effects of humor are independent of the individual's ability level. Subjects--students from either the high SAT (approximate average of 1200 points) population (HS), or the low SAT (approximate…

A series of studies was conducted over a three-year period to determine whether the teaching technique developed in the 1960s called "inquiry training" is effective for teaching problem-solving, thinking, and/or decision-making skills. (Inquiry training is a process in which students are provided with a puzzling situation, are given the…

Experimental phenomenology requires that educators acknowledge the experiences of the learner. Today, many of those experiences are images that come from television. In a behaviorist or humanist tradition, learning takes place through experience, and learners comprehend, make decisions, and analyze their behavior through reflection. Meaning is…

Based on the idea that even the most barren-looking black-topped schoolyard can be used for regular, brief field trips, this curriculum package of springtime science experiences provides guidelines for conducting kindergarten learning activities outside the classroom. Goals of the field trips are to teach some pre-reading concepts, to begin the…

A study using a biasing paradigm examined four hypotheses regarding specific mechanisms thought to underlie the Assimilation-plus-Correction (A-C) theory of schema-text interactions. According to this theory, the ideas implied by a schema (type-1 ideas) are thought to be assimilated and obscured, while those ideas representing novel information…

If students are first taught writing as experience, then become aware of the intellectual and imaginative operations they use to shape that experience, they will be better able to manage the thinking and writing tasks of the various academic disciplines and of the world of work. This is the purpose of a proposed upper-level writing course that…

This is the second in a series of six units for administrators and teachers to serve the Environmental Goal, one of Pennsylvania's Twelve Goals of Quality Education. The environmental goal states that quality education should help every student acquire the knowledge and attitudes necessary to maintain the quality of life in a balanced environment.…

Recent experiments have shown that people process information about themselves more efficiently than other kinds of information. To investigate individual differences in the processing of self-relevant information, subjects (N=41) rated the self- and other-applicability of 90 traits and completed nine standard personality scales. Several measures…

A study was conducted to determine the treatment of intrapersonal communication in basic communication course texts published in the last 10 years. Only 29 of the 77 textbooks surveyed covered the topic at all, and many of those treated it in a superficial manner. After being divided into two categories according to subject matter, public speaking…

Previous research has shown that different emotions are associated with different attributions. To examine the situational context, i.e., the relationships between attributions and emotions as well as the inter-relationships within emotions and within attributions under separate success and failure conditions, 208 college students performed…

A study was conducted to investigate the compensatory effects of graphic organizers on text organization. Subjects were 114 tenth grade students who read two versions of an expository passage containing identical information but differing in top level structure. The version organized to show opposing views (comparison/contrast) was considered…

In order to describe developments in children's conceptions of numbers and numerical relations, judgments of similarities between numbers were solicited from adults and from children in kindergarten and grades 3 and 6. A nonmetric multidimensional scaling analysis suggested that children gradually become sensitive to an expanding set of numerical…

Little is known about the precise nature of the processing, storage, and recall strategies functional in spatial recall. High school and college samples completed tasks in field-dependence-independence, figural creativity, and verbal abilities. Spatial recall ability was assessed through a map reconstruction task in which subjects were required to…

The purpose of this study was to determine if academic achievement differed among the Piagetian cognitive levels of teacher education students and if these differences interacted with sex, age, classification (e.g., freshmen, sophomores), or ACT scores. Sample for the study consisted of 670 students enrolled in a developmental psychology class.…