This document comprising of two essays, "Challenging Prospective Teachers' Understandings of History" (G. Williamson McDiarmid) and "Reflections of a Journeyman Historian" (Peter Vinten-Johansen), provides a uniquely detailed account of what students study and learn in a historiography course. The course described is unusual in its attention to…

A hierarchy of auditory processing developed by Derek Sanders for use in developing sequential objectives for musical listening skills serves as the basis for this article. Because of the similarities between components of speech and music, the hierarchy is congruent with musical listening expectations. While this model was designed for the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of cooperative learning strategies on: (1) performance, (2) attitude toward working in teams, and (3) group behaviors in a technical training context. Subjects were 274 engineering employees enrolled in a required training class that focused on the importance of communicating technical…

This paper describes the theoretical rationale and the practical application of a teaching strategy that helps students organize psychological knowledge according to four perspectives: psychoanalytic, behavioristic, humanistic, and cognitive. The strategy is a simple flow chart which requires students to appropriately fill in boxes with names of…

The literature on learning styles is full of unresolved issues, both theoretical and practical. Early research into learning styles includes that of H. A. Witkin, who developed the Embedded Figures Test in the late 1960s. This test determines the "field dependence" or "field independence" of individuals, marking their global…

Recognizing the fact that today's students leave school each day and go home to minimal adult supervision and lack a consistently available resource to help with homework assignments, this paper discusses how to organize well-planned homework clinics for these students. The paper first advances several reasons why such clinics are important, and…

The traditional system of direct instruction focuses on students' acquiring a body of knowledge and developing related skills. It has been recognized for some time now that direct instruction needs to be combined with more humanistic methods of education, which invite students to be more actively involved in the learning process and are focused on…

An alternative view of learning and an alternative view of research on learning are described in this paper. Learning is seen as a change in the conception of some aspect of reality and it is argued that learning has to be described in terms of its content. This line of research is intended to represent the learner's perspective and the…

A cognitive processing model was adopted by the task force developing the National Association of Secondary School Principals' (NASSP) Learning Style Profile (LSP). The LSP contains 23 independent scales representing four higher order factors: cognitive skills; perceptual responses; study preferences; and instructional preferences. The subscales…

Following a brief discussion of the lack of definition and cohesion in the social studies and the curriculum, the paper argues that the reflective inquiry rationale has had the most significant influence of all the alternative rationales for the field and its curriculum. The paper presents its case in four basic sections. The first section,…

Four reasoning skills help explain the processes that students need to use in completing various study skills exercises: (1) classification--the process that a student uses to name a body of information or to associate a bit of information with a larger chunk of information; (2) sequencing--the process by which a student organizes information into…

Focusing on primary school children, a study investigated whether children can profit from the use of explanatory analogies to acquire information from expository text. Subjects, 24 kindergarteners and 34 second graders in a midwestern town, listened to 4 texts describing relatively unfamiliar topics with or without explanatory analogies. The…

Metacognitive strategy instruction was used to teach two deaf children (ages 11 and 12) with differing American Sign Language and English language skills to summarize stories in writing. The instructional program used a knowledge of text structure--specifically story structure--to improve literacy skills by enhancing the children's ability to…

In two experiments, differences were investigated between youths (mean age 13 years) and comparison groups with respect to (1) performance on paired-associate tasks involving meaningful and nonmeaningful words, (2) reported use of spontaneously produced learning strategies, and (3) degree to which learning strategies facilitated recall. Under…

The paper describes a learning skills program designed to serve college students whose learning styles are different from the norm and whose skill levels vary widely. Development phases of the program featured a task force approach to needs assessment, planning, initial pilot testing, and ongoing faculty development. Difficulties encountered in…