Explores the role of interpersonal cognitive complexity in the character impressions, story comprehension, response preferences, and literary attitudes of eleventh grade students. Results suggest that interpersonal cognitive complexity predisposes readers toward complex perceptions of literary characters. (HOD)

Discusses the emerging assumptions of literature and its teaching that knowledge is made and must be remade by each person. Considers the relationships between the reader and the text, the reader and the reader, and the relationship between texts. (EL)

Provides a number of ways teachers can use newspapers to teach comprehension and critical thinking and to help students develop sensitivity in awareness of the self, the community, the nation, and the world. (FL)

Contrasts the revising patterns of junior high school students when they used a word processor and pens and paper. Concludes that those who used a word processing program added more words to the ends of their texts and corrected more errors, but did not make more global text revisions than when they used a pen. (HOD)

Discusses the benefits of rational self-counseling for middle school students and explains how to teach it and how to maintain students' interest. (BL)

Describes a study which examines "introducer forms" used by English as a second language learners to initiate picture descriptions. Results suggest that students receiving formal second language instruction process the input data in ways which are more "acquisition-like" and often not consistent with what the teacher intends…

Explores the role of memory in mediating mass communication effects. Examines (1) the nature of memory, (2) issues in retention and recall of media messages, (3) methods of promoting retention and recall of media messages, and (4) implications of memory processes for mass media effects. (PD)

Describes SPAWN, a technique for helping teachers make writing assignments in which students must first read, then integrate information from reading with their background experiences, to produce a piece of writing. (FL)

Indicates that certain items in reading comprehension tests are not measuring for hearing impaired students the particular reading skill they are intended to measure. Argues for a word/idea association strategy as the explanation for this and briefly discusses its relevance for testing and educating the hearing impaired. (FL)

Describes a classroom project for middle school students where developmental theory was translated into instruction promoting cognitive development. (MD)

Employs a well-developed information-processing task to assess the nature of the representation and activitation of letters and geometrical figures and the changes that occur with reading development. (FL)

When the introductory philosophy course evokes cognitive dissonance over philsophical problems in which students are already interested, it can help develop students' skills in reasoning and assessing arguments. This kind of course should play a key role in the undergraduate curriculum. (MSE)

Discusses impact of three selected command language facilities (positional or free text operations, crossfile searching, term frequency analysis--ZOOM) on the man-system interface in relation to operational online information retrieval (IR). A cognitive IR model, searchers' knowledge structures, and searching with different types of command…

Investigated women's (N=35) aptitude for and changes in skills during an engineering training program and the relationship between academic/demographic information and cognitive skills to success in the program. Compares results with those of studies of male undergraduates. Includes results of mathematics anxiety and conservation of horizontality…

Determined if differences in performance on a posttest (in which sections differed in use of manipulative models to answer questions) were attributable to differences in reasoning levels of chemistry students (N=105). Results indicate that reasoning may affect performance under conditions of constant instruction. (JN)