This study examined the way children learn about and use the novel features of videodiscs. Nine 9- and 10-year-old students in a progressive private school in New York City participated in the study. None had prior experience with videodisc technology. The two videodiscs which served as test materials--"The First National Kidisc" and "Fun and…

In traditional programming courses assignments usually consist of problems that are somewhat closed in nature. That is, students are usually given a rigidly defined problem statement and are provided with a set of data that they are to use to test their program to produce a unique result. While this approach makes evaluation easy, it discourages…

A study is reported in which 7 children (2 girls and 5 boys, 11 to 12 years of age) with a year of LOGO Programming experience were asked to think aloud about how a LOGO procedure would work, and then to predict by hand-simulation of the programs, what the graphics turtle "pen" would draw when the program was executed. While all children…

Ways of finding the sums of some interesting sequences of numbers are discussed. Finding the patterns creates a challenge, but the patterns are not too difficult for average pupils to discover. Mathematical induction can then be used to prove the formulas. (LS)

This article describes a visit to the Maison des Petits school in Geneva, Switzerland where Piaget had observed young children. (PD)

Excerpt from "Classroom Out-of-Doors, published by Sequoia Press, Kalamazoo, Michigan (

Low cost microcomputers with high resolution graphics provide students and educators with fast and accurate visual representations of mathematics relations and extend the benefits of discovery learning into the high school and college mathematics classroom. A recent challenge has been to use the computer in motivating students and teaching…

The calculator is used to explore the distributive property of a unary operator over a binary operator. This is an extension of an earlier paper. The emphasis is on student discovery of the property for various combinations of the operators. Instructional material contained in the report include a reference sheet of questions for potential…

THE AUTHOR BELIEVES THAT BY BORROWING IDEAS AND PROCEDURES FROM CONTEMPORARY MOVEMENTS IN EDUCATION AND PSYCHOLOGY INDLUDING--DEFINITION OF EDUCATIONAL GOALS IN BEHAVIORAL TERMS, PROGRAMMED INSTRUCTION, DISCOVERY LEARNING, AND COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY THEORIES, A USABLE COUNSELING MODEL CAN BE CONSTRUCTED. RELEVANT ETHICAL ASSUMPTIONS, INCLUDING THE…

The author describes some of the techniques used in the Pennsylvania Comprehensive Reading Communication Arts Plan (PCRP) which provides reading/language arts activities for junior high school level gifted students. It is explained that PCRP experiences include responding to literature, sustained silent reading of self selected books, oral and…

This paper addresses the issue of learning to write and the need for defining a means of teaching the process of composing. Following a description of what kind of process writing is not, the composing process is presented as a continuum of making meaning out of a chaos of images, half-truths, remembrances, and syntactic fragments. The discovery…