Multiple regression was used to examine the relationship between the serial position and the rated importance of a proposition in a text and the probability of its appearance in free recall protocols. Eight passages were used in the study--four from a standard social studies textbook and four written for the study. Each passage was divided into…

Noting that register and cohesion are two concepts that define a text, this paper describes register as the variety of language that is appropriate for the situation of the speech event and cohesion as the semantic relations in a text that make it coherent. The first part of the paper discusses three cross-cultural studies of comprehension…

In this study four research strategies used in previous studies of the socialization of cognitive skills were first contrasted and then assessed in terms of five criteria. (The data base for this study was 32 videotapes of mothers preparing their 7- or 9-year-old children to take a memory test.) The four strategies (frequency coding, fine-grained…

Much recent cognitive and artificial intelligence research has focused on the development of "schema theory." This theory supposes the existence of knowledge and memory structures that encode prototypical descriptions of familiar concepts. Schema theory has developed in a scientific environment that stresses interdisciplinary approaches…

Using the split-span technique in which auditory stimuli are presented in various combinations to the right and left ears, two studies were designed to examine the preferences of subjects as to their mode of recall, to assess the accuracy of such recall, and to look at possible sex differences in both the preferences and the accuracy. A total of…

Defining a "misconception" as an error of translation (transformation, correspondence, interpolation, interpretation) between two different kinds of information which causes students to have incorrect expectations, a Taxonomy of Errors has been developed to examine student misconceptions in an introductory biology course for science…

Environmental education, as a teaching methodology, is appropriate for all subject areas and environments. Two teaching approaches are presented with the 13 activities in this booklet serving as examples of their application to the forest environment and different disciplines. The first approach is based upon the understanding that learners retain…

A study was conducted to evaluate children's ability to comprehend main ideas after reading connected discourse and to develop and validate a straightforward and intuitively simple system for identifying main ideas in prose. Three experimental passages were randomly selected from third and sixth grade social studies textbooks, and education…

A study investigated the hypothesis that mental imagery facilitates access to prior knowledge and therefore enhances the ability to infer and make text-relevant predictions. The subjects, 29 first grade and 29 third grade students, were randomly assigned to either an experimental group where they were instructed to make pictures in their head to…

Educators have relied on the work of Jean Piaget for many years in an effort to understand the intellectual capabilities of children and adolescents. Piaget, however, did not consider instruction and school experiences to be factors that influenced children's conceptual development. The Soviet psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, proposed the opposite:…

Focusing on changes in the minds of the audience, this study of the impact of television programs provides a general analysis of the perceptual spectrum of the television audience and its values, preferences, and attachments to the content of television programs. Influences are identified and cued to the development of programming, and findings of…

Approaches to helping students remember concepts in secondary mathematics are presented. The eleven points listed are: 1) distinguishing between natural and whole numbers; 2) remembering isosceles triangles have two equal sides; 3) finding all possible pairs of integral factors of a given number; 4) recalling the meaning of reflexive, symmetric,…

Gestalt Therapy is in a growth crisis. In practice, there is an abundance of inadequate practitioners and trainers of Gestalt Therapy. In the literature, there is an abundance of introductory works, a paucity of advanced texts, and a misunderstanding and inadequate representation of Gestalt Therapy. Gestalt Therapy training is confused by unclear…

The left hemisphere of the brain is analytic and "particularistic" in orientation--focusing on individual elements within a field and analyzing them sequentially. The right hemisphere of the brain is holistic or relational in processing, and is predisposed to see wholes simultaneously. One of the most prominant features of the EEG is the asymmetry…

The rationale for referring to 'hypnocounseling' rather than to 'hypnotherapy' lies in the rejection of the medical model for dealing with behavioral problems. Hypnocounseling is a modality of mental health counseling, a body of knowledge which can be applied to the framework of any personality theory by a trained mental health counselor of any…