A study investigated how text features influence the amount of vocabulary knowledge students acquired incidentally while reading expositions. Three sets of text features were identified from studies on comprehension: (1) features associated with the macrostructure, (2) features associated with logical and temporal relations in the microstructure,…

The details of a 6-year investigation entitled the Education Testing Service (ETS) Collaborative Research Project on Reading, which brought researchers and educators together in classroom studies of young children learning to read, are presented in this book. The first four chapters of the book describe the theoretical rationale, design, and…

Adventure games designed for use on home computers are a potentially powerful instructional resource in English as a second language because they promote problem-solving using the target language and are highly motivating to students. The games, whose objective is usually for the user to defeat an obscure force and recover a precious object, are…

Fifty-four high aptitude undergraduates and 46 moderate-to-low aptitude undergraduates were divided into four treatment groups and were given a pretest during which they learned and recalled a map of a small town in five successive trials. Two weeks later, each group was given a different treatment with a varying degree of explicitness of…

Drawing upon data from a series of studies, this paper analyzes children's verbalizations about a wordless picture book to discover any relationships between a child's learning style and his or her comprehension of events in the book. Using the definitions of learning style established by M. Rosenberg, the paper also compares the behavior of…

A competency-based instructional program was developed to improve the training and performance of paraprofessionals working in education programs for special needs students. The content is designed to meet the training needs of entry-level instructional paraprofessionals serving in public school programs. The content is presented in five modules,…

Some recent research on the development of reading materials for bilingual instruction and instruction in English as a second language (ESL) concerning the appropriate language of academic texts and students' self-awareness of the learning process is reviewed, and a plan for the development of an academic reading program is outlined. The plan has…

Evidence from followup studies of teacher education graduates indicates that teachers do not value certain major components of their teacher education programs and do not really remember or know what their teacher education programs attempted to teach them. While educational experts cite the extensiveness and comprehensiveness of teacher education…

The Learning in Science Project (Primary)--LISP(P)--was designed to examine problems and difficulties in primary science and to explore ways of overcoming these problems. Early research led to a proposal that children's questions and explanations could form the basis of an alternative teaching approach. However, several issues were raised which…

In an effort to examine issues raised by the effort to assess the performance of educational institutions, a project focusing on the social purposes and intellectual foundations of assessment practices in education was initiated. The primary goal of the project was to explore the possibility of developing new, more appropriate educational…

A study investigated the process of learning French by Chinese students, as revealed by student errors in 48 compositions and 33 oral reports. Grammatical, or competency, errors were categorized by type and frequency. Analysis of the results shows the most frequent errors to be, in declining order of occurrence: in the use of articles; choice of…

Synergistic psychology has been proposed as a meta theory for synthesizing different psychological theories into an explanation of how social, cognitive, and biological factors interact in human behavior. The basic theoretical assumption in synergistic psychology is that internalized social interactions become higher mental functions that regulate…

The Scientific Theory and Method Project (STAMPS) is concerned with students' understanding of two areas of science in secondary schools. One is understanding what a scientific theory is, and the other is understanding the methods used in conducting scientific research. In the science curriculum these topics are often described as the process of…

This paper presents a critical review of computer assisted instruction (CAI); an overview of recent intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs), including current perceived shortcomings; major activities of the field, i.e., analysis of teaching/learning processes, and extending and developing artificial intelligence techniques for use in intelligent…

John Dewey proposed a transactive educational process in which personal experiences and development interacted with curriculum in order to transform the learner and the learning procedure. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate ways in which some of Dewey's concepts of progressive education provide a theoretical rationale for the increasing…