To provide the most effective instruction, materials, and support for beginning readers, teachers need to know if young children are more likely to process from print to meaning-- bottom-up or text-driven processing--or to interpret print to follow meaning--top-down or concept-driven processing. While some studies reveal a correlation between…

A theory of how people learn certain procedural skills is presented. It is based on the idea that the teaching and learning that goes on in a classroom is like an ordinary conversation. The speaker (teacher) compresses a non-linear knowledge structure (the target procedure) into a linear sequence of utterances (lessons). The listener (student)…

Prepared by members of the Institute for Research on Teaching and the Center for the Study of Reading, the papers in this collection examine reading comprehension as an interactive process and explore how comprehension instruction occurs in the complex workplace of the classroom. Specific topics discussed in 20 papers include the following: (1)…

This document, intended to provide Peace Corps volunteers with practical skills and underlying theory, includes 8 chapters, a 35-item bibliography, an index, and a user reaction form. Chapter 1 describes nonformal education (NFE) through an example from Togo. Chapter 2 provides three case studies of NFE in action: (1) finding space to make school…

This monograph describes the theory and practice of the invitational learning model as it applies to school counseling and development. Invitational learning is a paradigm for personal and professional functioning, and for organizational restructuring, based on four values regarding the nature of people and their potential and the nature of…

This paper is a transcription from memory of a short talk that used overhead projector slides, with musical examples played on an Apple Macintosh computer and a Yamaha CX5 synthesizer. The slides appear in the text as reduced "icons" at the point where they would have been used in the talk. The paper concerns ways in which artificial intelligence…

In fall 1984, a program was implemented at Daytona Beach Community College (Florida) with the dual purpose of integrating subject material between courses and establishing a close community of learners to cooperate in the mastery of subject matter. In the fall semester, participating students enroll in a block of three courses; English I,…

This article discusses the assessment of self-regulated learning processes as students acquire cognitive skills in specific academic domains. Domain-specific assessment is useful for understanding student learning and for planning instructional activities that help to promote it. Although much psychological research has used general measures of…

This paper discusses higher-order cognitive skills, provides examples of appropriate test item content in various subject areas, and describes higher-level cognitive skills which might be tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Higher-order cognitive skills are said to be more difficult to measure than simpler skills;…

The Feuerstein Mediated Learning Experience and Cognitive Modifiability theories show promise for American Indian people who, despite much innovation, still search for learning theories which can provide native people with necessary tools for making efficient qualitative and quantitative adaptations to an ever-changing technological, cultural,…

This paper analyzes mastery learning as an alternative to curriculum planning and discusses implementation of the strategy in a prekindergarten through eighth-grade school district in Red Bank, New Jersey. The paper briefly describes district schools and circumstances affecting the school board's decision to implement mastery learning; discusses…

Research summarized here demonstrates how similarity thinking can be used in training programs to help ethnic minority children acquire basic skills. Current achievements are often attenuated by poor language skills, especially when English is not the first language of the child. Similarity thinking assesses the child's ability to learn without…

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "Violations of Frege's Principle and Their Significance for Contrastive Semantics" (Dafydd Gibbon); "Writing the Contrastive Grammar of English and Dutch. The Treatment of Modal Notions" (Flor Aarts and Herman Wekker); "The Theory and Methodology…

A prescriptive theory for learning which delivers prescriptions for designing prototypes of instructional materials with different knowledge structures, the Elaboration Theory of Instruction (ETI) is based on important principles and theories of learning and instruction. This paper reports three experiments which tested ETI. The first experiment…

Four similarities between reading and writing and their corresponding instructional significance are examined in this literature review. Each of the four reviewed topics is prefaced by general instructional suggestions based on research cited in the review. Topics and suggestions are as follows: (1) linguistic--whenever possible, the processes of…