The two goals of this investigation were to (1) examine the comprehension monitoring strategies adults employ when trying to understand procedural instructions and (2) determine how comprehension may be affected by varying such instructions. Sixty-eight college students, using instructions that consisted of either text alone, illustrations alone,…

The primary role of education is the production of positive changes in the learner. Teachers make decisions regarding effective experiences conducive to helping students change their behaviors. Evaluation provides evidence to help teachers and students attain desired goals of instruction and the objectives of education. Four types of evaluation…

This paper examines the theories of Herman T. Epstein, who has suggested that there may be a correlation between Piaget's stages of intellectual development and the brain growth stages. Epstein's research has indicated that the human brain grows in spurts rather than in simple linear increments across time. Of special significance to educators is…

A three-part study compared similarity-based learning (in which concepts are formed based on similarity among multiple examples) and explanation-based learning (in which general schema are acquired from a single example) in schema acquisition. Subjects, 16 undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology courses at the University of Illinois and…

This paper examines the role of learner motivation--elements that arouse, sustain, and direct behavior--as the pivotal factor in education, and urges researchers to consider the motivational state of the individual learner in interaction with the instructional method. It is emphasized that a thorough understanding of the learner's personality, as…

Advanced knowledge acquisition in a subject area is different in many important ways from introductory learning (and from expertise). In this paper some of the special characteristics of advanced learning of complex conceptual material are discussed. The paper notes that these characteristics are often at odds with the goals and tactics of…

This study sought to determine if 17 affective variables on the Canfield Learning Styles Inventory Form S-A would discriminate among teaching areas of Mississippi public school teachers. The learning style inventory was administered to 86 teachers grouped into four teaching areas: elementary, secondary, special education, and others (library…

Like any apparently novel approach to the basic epistemological problems of "knowledge," the constructivist ideas that have spread in the last 20 years continue to generate a host of negative as well as a few positive reactions. This document focuses on some aspects of Radical Constructivism, as distinct from "trivial"…

A study analyzed three episodes of self-repetition in a 1-year-old's utterances and examined the child's use of self-repetition for exploiting and elaborating on his phonological system in the context of discourse. The subject was a first-born monolingual child in the Stanford Child Phonology project. The analysis provides clues about how the…

The purpose of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) Learning Style Profile is to provide educators with a well-validated and easy-to-use instrument for diagnosing the cognitive styles, perceptual response tendencies, and study/instructional preferences of middle level and senior high school students. The Learning Style…

An illustration of the cognitive theory of inquiry teaching is presented in this paper in a tutorial dialogue on the nature of lenses. After a description of the goals of the method, the paper discusses the following ten general strategies inquiry teachers use to accomplish the goals: (1) selecting positive and negative exemplars, (2) varying…

Six museum education and learning researchers discuss the need to study how people learn and behave in museums and what kind of current research studies should be undertaken. Mary Ellen Munley, in "Back to the Future: A Call for Coordinated Research Programs in Museums," describes the differences between the terms…

A study assessed the effects of metacognitive training in question answering strategies on students' ability to answer postreading comprehension questions. In the first part of the study, baseline data concerning the level of metacognitive awareness exhibited by expert readers when answering questions were gathered through the use of 44 skilled…

This paper proposes that three properties of graphic materials can be manipulated by instructional designers to model cognitive processes and thus help students learn. These properties are: the distance of elements in the graphic display from each other, the orientation of the elements to each other, and the sequence in which the elements are…

A conceptual framework of a process by which persons assess and express levels of sureness in the correctness of responses which they anticipate making--or having already made but not yet received knowledge of results--is proposed. It is hypothesized that the rate at which a person's behavior is modified by knowledge of results is affected by the…