Since May 1980, participants in the Early Adolescent Project at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York have studied the early adolescent as a learner in a series of colloquia, discussions, and observations. The purpose of the study has been to develop recommendations for schooling of the early adolescent and for continuing and…

An 18-month study examined the way adults learn in rural settings, particularly those adults over the age of 25 who have not completed a high school education or its equivalency. The study was organized into three major phases. The first phase consisted of a survey interview of 93 adults living in a rural county in Vermont. The second phase…

Reading improvement programs that have focused on additional staff for teaching, tutoring, and counseling; prescriptive, self-paced learning methods; unstructured open-education strategies; and intensive reading have often been successful in small towns and middle sized cities, but none has made a major impact on the reading achievement of…

The eight chapters in this book relate the experiences and reflections of six researchers/teachers who set out to teach five students who had failed to acquire a useful degree of literacy. The book also provides a great deal of information about many of the central topics of teaching literacy: children's motivation, the influence of social and…

An ethnographic study of kindergarten through grade two classrooms was conducted of various sociolinguistic contexts in which young students were developing oral and written language competencies. Nonparticipant observations were conducted in both regular classrooms and Chapter I small group classroom settings. The observations were analyzed from…

This report was part of the total scope of The Microcomputers and Middle School Problem Solving project. It employed representational models during problem solving in order to study: (1) observable patterns in self-directed use of representational models; (2) correlations between use of models and problem-solving ability; and (3) the motives of…

The general aim of this article is to explore South Asian music and culture in an educational context. The fieldwork on which it is based mainly consists of semi-structured interviews with pupils of South Asian origin (aged 11-18) who attend a secondary school in Ilford, Essex. The learning methods of South Asian musicians are considered and a…

Today's experiential learning rests on long and worthy traditions. But the university's emphasis on analytic, reflective, and theoretical studies and its neglect of concrete experiences, practical applications, and active experimentation have been equally long-standing. The learning cycle of concrete experience, observation and reflection,…

Full school days of first and second grades were observed in three inner city schools with primarily minority enrollments. Detailed logs were recorded of activities in terms of subject area, grouping setting, and presence or absence of teacher or aide supervision. The base data and their summaries with respect to pupil and teacher time are…

In a recent paper (1977) Levenston and Blum suggested that lexical simplification operates according to universal principles, and that these derive from the individual's semantic competence in his mother tongue. This paper examines the validity of this suggestion by means of a comparative study of lexical simplification in three different…

Pedagogical grammar is the presentation of grammatical information for teaching purposes. Two important distinctions are relevant here: reference books versus teaching grammars programmed into a course, and generalized versus specialized grammars, (depending on the extent to which they have been designed to meet specific teaching/learning…

The goal of this study was to assess the relationship between amount of instructional time and student achievement. Two questions were addressed: (a) Do students who have more time allocated to a particular subject area also learn more in that area? and (b) Do students who spend more "engaged time" in a particular subject area learn more in that…

The conference reported here addressed the differences in learning writing among students who do not speak standard American English. In "Introduction to Black English," Robert Berdan notes the variability of Black dialect. Maryellen Garcia discusses the range of language abilities inherent in "Spanish-English Bilingualism in the…

Descriptive and evaluative information is provided in this report on Project COMPAS (Consortium for Operating and Managing Programs for the Advancement of Skills), a cooperative effort between seven community colleges which developed cognitive skills programs for entry-level freshmen. Chapter I reviews the unique features of Project COMPAS,…

A training experiment was made with 40 bilingual/bicultural preservice teachers that compared the effectiveness of two teaching strategies. The students were taught using a self-instructional (field-independent) approach or a cooperative (field-sensitive) approach. At the same time, both groups were learning to combine field-sensitive and field…