This study is one of the few that have addressed the teacher's involvement in children's peer interactions. Some of the ways in which teacher beliefs and intentions interact reflexively with contextual factors to produce particular social realities in preschool settings are examined. Four experienced early childhood teachers of acknowledged…

This document outlines an approach to creativity called "developmental dramatics," in which process is considered to be infinitely more important than performance. "Four pillars of the foundation of learning" are explored in discussions of art and visual, music, movement, and make-believe activities. Basic guidelines for…

The current "Writing Across the Curriculum" movement so prevalent in the public schools is based upon the premise that writing is a powerful tool for assisting learning, from the processing of facts through the creating of personal judgments. The "writing to learn" literature draws heavily on research in the fields of learning…

Issues pertaining to thinking skills are discussed in an attempt to clarify what thinking skills are and their components, how they function and how they can be developed in the teaching-learning environment. Chapter 1 reviews the definitions of thinking skills. These definitions are selected from the current literature on education and…

A study examined whether the higher-order thinking patterns elicited by a reader response approach would carry over and become part of students' ways of thinking about literature, even in the absence of reader response prompts. Subjects were fourth-grade students (48 in all) in two intact, heterogeneously grouped classrooms in the same elementary…

Higher level questions can link evaluation directly to language related class activities. Utilizing higher level questions is a powerful pedagogical technique and serves many direct purposes in the class environment. One of the models most commonly taught to teachers is Hilda Taba's levels of questions. Taba's model delineates four related…

Viewing language as both presentational and representational, or as having both manifest and latent content, can help writing instructors and student writers appreciate its full function and better understand the nature of writing errors. This essential duality of language usage is seen by its functions consisting of unconscious (primary process)…

The University of Swaziland was contacted to assist in evaluating the effectiveness of a computer training program at Waterford Kamhlaba, a secondary school in Swaziland. Two other secondary schools were selected as controls, and the evaluation of several variables was carried out with each of the schools' Form 1 students: (1) ideational fluency…

This document contains a series of papers which attempt to de-mystify the subject of artificial intelligence and to show how some countries in the European Community (EC) are approaching the promotion of development and application of artificial intelligence systems that can be used as an aid in vocational training programs, as well as to…

This study investigated the interaction between hemispheric specialization and pictorial recognition memory for pictures presented in three different color modes: realistic color, non-realistic color, and monochrome (back and white). The study was also designed to confirm the efficacy of applying signal detection analysis to color recognition…

Possibilities of conceptual and pragmatic analysis exist for identifying epistemological processing in teacher thinking. These modes of organizing thought condition classroom planning, shape meaning from a virtual didactic knowledge-store, and scaffold further pedagogical interactions. The semio-cognitive grammar proposed is adapted to the…

This paper proposes a collaborative processing model for art education that draws upon the language and learning theories of Lev S. Vygotsky. This model is a means by which students' natural affinity for socialization and inclination to attend to their own personal agendas may be used to increase learning motivation and effectiveness. The model…

Basic theoretical assumptions support the contention that writing has an important role to play in the teaching of reading and learning processes. E. M. Forster focused on the product of writing as an embodiment of either finished or evolving thought, and Ann E. Berthoff emphasizes the capacity of language to generate itself and, in so doing,…

Intended for practitioners, this book's major purpose is to reaffirm the unique and integral roles reading and literacy play in middle school curriculum and instruction. The book emphasizes: (1) the research-based rationale for what educators teach in reading and how it is taught; (2) an integration of reading with writing; (3) an acknowledgement…

Two hypotheses, the cognitive capacity hypothesis and the selective attention hypothesis, try to account for the facilitation effects of prior knowledge activation. They appear to be mutually exclusive since they predict different recall patterns as a result of prior knowledge activation. This study was designed to determine whether the two…