Compared laboratory and naturalistic content influences on formal reasoning tasks of 90 13-, 15-, and 17-year-olds, focusing on tasks requiring ability to control variables. Results indicate that 8 to 20 percent of performance variance was associated with task content. Content effects were also shown to reflect expectations about task variables.…

What is meant by meaningful instruction is discussed in terms of interest and relevance, pseudo-real problems, unconscious reinforcement, stories for symbols, and mathematical mirrors. That mathematics must be talked about with and by children is emphasized. (MNS)

Summarizes research findings on the structures, codes, and conventions of television as a communicative symbol, and on the effects of television on cognitive and social development. Suggests that television viewing can induce active cognitive processing, and that television can be a potent tool for teaching and communicating with young children.…

Cognition, as a key semantic descriptor, is examined to discover how its use reveals Western attitudes toward knowledge acquisition and toward art as a subject area. (Author/CS)

Describes an internship program at Colby-Sawyer College that prepares women for entry-level positions leading to management. The program develops the administrative ability needed to make decisions, solve problems, think logically, apply analytical methods, and understand human relations. (JOW)

An experiment on children's perception of urban distance is described, focusing on the study's methodology and analyses. Suggests that the methodology/analyses could be used by sixth-formers providing a means by which sixth-formers can develop their own examinations of urban distance perception. (JN)

Researchers studied the effect of interpolating extraneous information on students' ability to process cognitive information concerning their prior performances on the McCloy block test. The extraneous information was given in the interval between their last test and their next attempt to perform it. Results are discussed. (Author/PP)

Four instructional designs to teach pelvic examinations to second-year medical students were compared: traditional sequence, and practice in premotor, postmotor, and combined premotor and postmotor skill development. Mental practice produced better performance on the abilities to list the examination sequence and record findings. (Author/MSE)

After reviewing technological and social changes in society and drawing on the work of Teilhard de Chardin and other philosophers, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration executive challenges educators to show humans the way to a better integration of intellect and intuition and greater unanimity on ethical priorities. (MLF)

Dental instructors are encouraged to use questioning techniques more frequently in clinical and preclinical courses, to stimulate independent thinking. The characteristics of questioning, types of questions, reluctance to use the techniques, strategies with various student types, and strategies for awkward situations are discussed. (MSE)

Describes an instructional procedure based on the findings of schema research and illustrating the truth that the more students know about a subject, the better they can comprehend what they read about that subject. (FL)

Finds evidence that the reading of content area materials is done less effectively than is the reading of basal readers or trade books, particularly at the lower grade levels. (FL)

Examined is the effectiveness of three imagery learning strategies (copy, relational, and hierarchical) for acquiring different outcomes when individuals received visual instructional information varying in visual stimulus complexity. The hierarchical strategy was generally more effective in processing the different levels of information than the…

Individual differences in digit span, susceptibility to proactive interference, and various aptitude/achievement test scores were investigated in two experiments with college students. Results indicated that digit span was strongly correlated with aptitude/achievement scores, but did not indicate that susceptibility to proactive interference…

This study replicated Daneman and Carpenter's finding that the reading span test, as a measure of working memory storage and process functions, is predictive of performance on standard reading comprehension tests. It showed that reading span is related to the ability to draw inferences from, integrate, and encode text information. (Author/PN)