This bulletin presents news and opinions of the staff of Project Brave of the St. John Valley in northern Maine. This issue contains many short selections in French, some in poetry and others in prose, written under the cultural influences of life around Madawaska. (SK)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the interrelationship between passage organization and the presence or absence of advance organizers. Two sets of stimulus materials were used. One set consisted of six paragraphs, each of which described the important events in the administration of one obscure American president. The second set of…

Investigates the language comprehension of elementary school children and the factors that affected acquisition of knowledge from connected discourse. Factors examined included oral and written language, message structure, characteristics of the learner, and conditions of the learning situation. (AA)

Undergraduates read a prose passage and were tested on its contents. Difficulty, permission to underline key phrases, and financial motivation were varied. Non-highly motivated subjects performed better on the easy version; underlining aided highly motivated subjects and those reading the difficult version. (Author/RD)

Four groups of 10- to 16-year-old educable mental retardates listened to a 20-sentence story; subjects (1) viewed pictures; (2) generated mental pictures; (3) heard each sentence twice; or (4) listened to the story once. Recall of story information was highest for those who viewed pictures. (Author/GDC)

The relationship between children's temporal ability and their comprehension of spoken prose as measured by a story recall test was studied using an incidental sample of 36 eleven-year-old subjects. The tests of temporal ability consisted of interval reproduction, interval division and pause perception. The nature of temporal ability and its role…

Providing specific instructions on reading material to be retained or to be forgotten induced college students to study all the material at a slower pace. A second experiment indicated that increased reading time was necessary for retention of the emphasized sentences. (Author/GDC)

The superior retention of superordinate ideas over time was replicated in this study which demonstrated the construct validity of a recognition test based upon the structure of a prose passage. A link was made between existing data on memory for prose and past theory: Ausubel's subsumption theory and Craik and Lockhart's levels-of-processing…

High cognitive processing capacity (CPC) students were superior to low-CPC students in prose learning. Of the four learning modes--programmed instruction (PI), control, chunking study outline, and adjunct questions--PI was the most effective. Substantial CPC and performance correlations and poor long-term retention suggested that PI was not best…

In a series of experiments, it was found that asking questions about information in a prose sequence while it is being presented can affect the degree to which that prose material is stored as a unitized whole, and that this in turn will affect how well that prose is remembered. (Editor)

Two experiments examining the effects of providing appropriate frameworks for comprehending ambiguous sections of prose were conducted with 143 children from second through seventh grade. (Author/JMB)

A prose text in veterinary medicine can be arranged and supplemented to facilitate efficient and effective acquisition into short-term memory. Methods include: variation in textual format; relating new information to previous knowledge and future goals; providing specific, test-relevant objectives or introductions, describing mnemonic devices; and…

The first experiment made use of adjunct questions to manipulate the probability that kindergarten and second-grade children would make inferences during comprehension. The second investigated the relative influence of memory for details, memory for explicit information, and age on memory for inferences. (Author/RH)

Describes a program of creative writing and describes student objectives and teacher objectives that allow the experience to aid students in producing critical essays. (CRH)

Through the guide's 39 chapters, a person can learn how to write his or her life, and how to prepare, submit, and sell the story. The guide offers advice on: ideas--how to spot them, enjoy them, and jot them down; first drafts and the value in simply telling the story and revising later; establishing a writing routine and keeping it; the hows and…