Vocabulary acquisition traditionally has been a struggle for students with special learning needs. This study involved an eleven year old fifth grade student with learning disabilities in reading and writing and limited English proficiency. Assistive technology assistance was provided from the Franklin Language Master 6000b and Microsoft's Power…

Virtual reality is an immersive, interactive medium that manipulates the senses in order provide users with simulated experiences in computer-generated worlds. The visual design of virtual reality is an important issue, but literature has tended to stress the medium's instructional potential rather than setting forth a protocol for designing…

This study attempts to gain information concerning the receptive, as opposed to the creative, aesthetic experience by talking to museum professionals who spend their working lives identifying, appraising, and explicating works of art. The study is based on an underlying assumption that rules and practices for looking at art exist and must be…

The arts are basic educational processes that involve students with different abilities and from differing age groups in sensory perception. This perception, augmented by the use of art compositions, establishes a critical dialogue between the medium and the viewer. What one views, sees, and observes in an art piece serves to create a…

This study compared the use of traditional methods and the use of reconstructive elaborations on learning specialized science vocabulary, involving two sixth-grade students with emotional disturbances. The reconstructive elaborations were pictures that linked together information to make it more familiar and meaningful, most commonly through the…

The word and picture processing abilities of 11 children (ages 6-10) with partial vision were studied in a variety of ways over a period of 14 months. The studies found that in processing words partially sighted children, like fully sighted children, used both lexical and nonlexical processing, though perhaps in difference balance. Recognition and…

A program was developed for improving the reading skills of 22 first-grade bilingual students in a suburban K-6 elementary school located northwest of Chicago. The problem was detected because the first grade bilingual students had not achieved reading fluency at the conclusion of the academic school year and, consequently, did not exhibit strong…

A study was conducted to investigate ways in which reading comprehension could be instructionally influenced and whether that influence differentially affected young and elderly adult learners. The study attempted, too, to determine whether advance organizers--instructional aids designed to precede a main passage and to provide an organizational…

Conveying an adequate conception of the nature of science to students is considered by many to be implicit in the broader context of what has come to be known as scientific literacy. It has also been demonstrated that possession of valid concepts of the nature of science do not necessarily result in better science teaching. This study examines the…

A study was conducted to refine the writing scale incorporated into the Peabody Individual Achievement Test-Revised. The test uses a single scale for judging writing samples from students in grades 2 through 12. It was questioned whether a single, relatively brief rating scale could have the sensitivity required to discriminate among the range of…

One aim of this study was to identify, in a group of unsuccessful college level problem solvers, the status and use of their declarative knowledge as revealed by students' attempts to solve novel problems in a pencil-and-paper setting. It was hypothesized that for some unsuccessful problem solvers, their problem representation could be improved by…

Controversy exists as to the specific approach to use in teaching language arts skills to culturally and linguistically different children who speak non-standard English. Three primary approaches involve eradicating, maintaining, or expanding the home language systems of such children. In the expansion approach, children are taught to use standard…

Pacing in the teaching of English as a second language (ESL) is considered. It is suggested that the problem of pacing is almost entirely a matter of teachers covering material so rapidly that the student frequently does not have the opportunity to integrate it. Since the recognition of sounds, symbols, and sentences is not mastery of them, it is…

This paper reports on a study conducted to clarify issues involving reward effects in children's probability learning; specifically, the detrimental-effects-of-reward theory, and the utility and expectancy theories. Five event schedules in which the probabilistic versus partial reinforcement dimension was separated from the number of choices in…

In three immediately succeeding trials, 45 young adults named 50 pictures of objects as rapidly as possible; word retrieval latencies were measured for each item. Before each trial, one experimental group was given information as to the word frequency (WF) level of the items' names. The other experimental group was given information as to the…