Because an instructor's attitude toward students' language is a crucial factor in determining whether students will be active participants in the educational process, it is important for teachers to be aware of dialect differences. Labelled by many as "nonstandard," Black English is a dialect derived from Gullah, a creole based on…

Students of reasoning have long tried to understand how people revise systems of beliefs. This paper maintains that people often change their beliefs in ways driven by considerations of explanatory coherence. In this report, a computational model is described of how experimental subjects revise their naive beliefs about physical motion. First,…

Andragogy has been posited as a theory of adult learning that provides a unifying concept for the practice of adult education. Because the assumptions of andragogy only indirectly adduce the needs of society and do not purport to accommodate the proprietary interests of institutions at all, it would seem that andragogy would not be appropriate as…

This monograph describes the job-related basic skills requirements of the work force and explores ways of developing and improving the reading, writing, and computational abilities of workers. The paper first examines trends that are influencing the demand for basic skills, such as the decline in youth population and the increase in service and…

Advances in cognitive science have greatly increased our knowledge of how the human mind stores and uses information. That knowledge can be used to decompose curricular objectives so as to increase the specificity of instruction to a level of precision that should greatly enhance student writing. This article identifies some major types of…

This research attempts to diagnose the skills required for successful spatial performance in order to provide a theoretical foundation for military training in such tasks as map reading, surveying, and navigation. It is known that successful performance on spatial tasks depends on task requirements (e.g., requisite knowledge, alternative paths to…

This monograph presents descriptions of six extensively researched and widely used cooperative learning methods and discusses research on the effects of cooperative learning. The term "cooperative learning" refers to instructional methods in which students of all levels of performance work together in small groups toward a common goal.…

Viewing literacy as the ability to make use of all available possibilities of written language, the essays in this collection deal with a broad range of literacy related topics and issues. Titles of the 13 essays, written over a 10-year period, are as follows: (1) "The Politics of Ignorance"; (2) "Twelve Easy Ways to Make Learning to Read…

Intended to help dispel several unsupported "myths" about reading instruction, this book analyzes a selected group of teaching practices that have been supported by reading experts but not by research findings. The "myths" discussed in the first 12 chapters of the book are as follows: (1) phonics hinders comprehension; (2) unpredictable spelling…

The reflections and theses on preschool children's literacy development presented in this book are the result of an experimental project carried out in Buenos Aires from 1974 to 1976. Chapter 1 discusses the educational situation in Latin America, traditional methods of reading instruction, contemporary psycholinguistics, the pertinence of…

The Australian term "fair dinkum" (meaning genuine, true, or real) in the title emphasizes the book's intention of providing thoughts and reflections on how to enhance the art and science of English teaching. Focusing on literacy, the book deals with action research or teaching theories that may suggest other strategies and further field…

A major problem in assessing off-campus experiential learning is the need to structure the learning process and document the learning outcomes. This report describes the procedure developed by the University of California at Los Angeles, that logically analyzes the learning that is taking place and therefore helps to shape and improve subsequent…

Suggestology is the science which studies the interaction between man and his environment, specifically in terms of unconscious inter-relations. Suggestopedia, an approach to second language instruction, is a matter of creating learning conditions that remove the results of previous conditioning and suggestion, permitting students' reserves to be…

The purposes of the paper are to discuss use of a concept formation model in art education and to suggest ways in which teachers might plan and develop art instructional activities consistent with the model. Based upon a social studies model designed along the lines of Robert Gagne's learning theory, the art education model utilizes rule, concept,…

Teachers and teacher educators seem to be little aware of some major concepts about instruction that provide important insights into the central requirements for learning. A common misconception is that motivation has to do with wanting or desiring. It is instead attention to stimuli that is influenced by two powerful agents--(1) suspense,…