The purpose of this study was to investigate students' perceptions of courses and instructors. The subjects were 810 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in education and psychology courses. A Feelings About Course test, consisting of a 50 item true-false instrument, was administered. Independent variables were the classification of the…

This study examined the conditions for the selection of certain communication strategies in terms of the inferencing ability of the learner, the formal proficiency level attained, and the features of the communicative situation (task requirements). Two groups of 17-year-olds--one studying advanced French and the other French as part of a "core"…

Several themes relevant to the personality development and intellectual functioning of children are presented in this position paper. Inferences for the education of Nigerian children are also drawn. Among general factors considered influential in children's intellectual development, three are emphasized: the way in which intelligence is defined,…

A study was made of the current status of exploratory or early field experience programs to evaluate their effectiveness and make recommendations relative to their use in teacher education programs. Four monographs resulting from the study are presented. The first categorizes the implicit and explicit rationales for field experiences in other…

A fixed-pace video-lesson which had adjunct questions (AQs) interspersed throughout was viewed by 134 freshman psychology students to determine if AQs have a facilitative effect on relevant and/or incidental learning from a videotape lesson, and, if they do, to discover the optimal combination of the factors of position and type of question, and…

The major components of playfulness in kindergarten children are physical, social, and cognitive spontaneity, manifest joy, and sense of humor. Children who are highly playful also show high scores in divergent and creative thinking. Piaget postulated that after the age of 7 or 8 this quality is replaced by assimilating the objective facts of the…

Transfer of knowledge and skills from the classroom to real life settings is an essential goal of any educational program. A study of microcounseling skills possessed by graduate students examined their interactions with classmates in a role playing situation. All students participated in skills training, responded to videotaped client vignettes,…

Overviews of schema theory, which focuses on the cognitive operations engaged in by the reader, and discourse analysis, which focuses on structural characteristics of the text itself, are presented in this paper. The first section explains the notion of cognitive schemata (patterns of expectations that are applied to incoming information) and…

Forty low-achieving seventh and eighth grade students were involved in a study to ascertain whether intelligence, underachievement, or the difference between aural and sight vocabularies could predict relative learning rate with respect to reading achievement gains. For purposes of the study, "relative learning rate" was defined as the ratio of…

This paper reports on an experiment undertaken to delineate more clearly the relationship between the naming process in children and certain aspects of the environment which may play a role in that process. The investigation concerned the effect of manipulation and of object novelty on naming. Sixteen children, ten girls and six boys, ranging in…

Nine prevalent ideas about reading in the content areas are analyzed in this paper. The ideas are as follows: (1) students can not read textbooks because elementary teachers did not teach them to read; (2) students can not read textbooks because of poor phonics and word recognition skills; (3) "real learning" results from reading, rather than from…

Two kinds of research groups have evolved in higher education: one devoted to student learning and the other to teacher training. Both groups share a common interest in the development of student thinking and appear to be proceeding along parallel paths, which may be to their disadvantage. At the same time, some researchers in teacher training are…

The learning module described is for the use of inservice teachers interested in a study of the process of inquiry. It is designed for a workshop-sized group of teachers at the secondary school level but may be adapted for teachers in the middle school. The topics addressed in this product relate to the process of inquiry and include questioning…

The module described is addressed to inservice teachers of all subject areas in the middle and secondary school levels. The goal of this module is to provide learners with sufficient knowledge about programmed instruction to enable them to implement programmed instruction in their classroom. The scope and sequencing of topics is outlined.…

Compared in this report based on a dissertation are the tendencies of Chinese and Americans to conform to their own cultural norms. Background information is provided through a review of pertinent literature and a discussion of conformity and imitation. Three experiments used in investigating the degree of conformity and imitation in Chinese and…