Six instructional units offer guidance in the process of writing printed educational materials. Each unit provides objectives, writing exercises and activities, and end-of-unit discussion questions. Unit 1 considers the first steps in writing, emphasizing the importance of varying instruction according to student needs and background and…

The present study was designed to identify parent-child interaction patterns that might differentiate bright from below average elementary students in order to test the hypothesis that environmental processes related to regulation of executive processes influence both children's learning and developmental level. Thirty-two mother-child dyads (16…

The William Perry model of learning is directly parallel to what has been learned about writing processes. He observed that the student is essentially a dualist who sees everything as right or wrong. This stance of absolute acceptance wavers when the student encounters varieties of or disagreements among truths, thus gradually evolving into the…

The double-entry journal requires students to write affective response statements to literature readings and to compare such entries with those of classmates. Use of the double-entry journal is intended to activate students' prior learning and present feelings, foster collaborative learning, integrate major language skills, and encourage the…

Drawing from basic assumptions about learning and critical thinking skills, this paper suggests a teaching method for helping community college students to use their critical thinking capacity in their college courses. First, a series of assumptions commonly held by teachers about the nature of learning are presented, and contrasted with…

The development of children's understanding of the learning process and factors that affect learning was explored with a sample of 18 children from 6 to 13 years of age. Subjects were interviewed, and three levels of their reasoning were identified. The 6- to 7-year-old subjects viewed learning as "doing" and reasoned that…

This paper develops a rationale for individualization of instruction and after a brief discussion of two alternative approaches--diagnostic-prescriptive teaching and modularized instruction--promotes learning centers as a practical approach to such individualization. Learning centers are defined as compact, highly-structured sets of didactic…

A series of studies addressed basic questions about instruction in subject areas such as science and social studies at the elementary level, focusing on group discussion of textbook content and addressing the effects of instruction in terms of students' knowledge acquisition and their independent reading comprehension of new content. Subjects,…

This case study examines the process of learning to read and write in a first-grade boy for whom difficulties in literacy acquisition were predicted from a battery of tests commonly used to identify learning disabilities (LD). Data included: (1) test scores from the school psychologist, speech therapist, audiologist, and from standardized school…

This review of the literature on interactive video examines research and evaluation reports in the context of the continuing debate over the effectiveness of media debate and Richard E. Clark's argument that media do not have a substantial impact on learning. The literature is examined from four perspectives: (1) behavioral issues (e.g., whether…

There are over 28 million children of alcoholics in the United States, 22 million of whom have now reached adulthood yet continue to experience emotional, mental, and physical effects of life in an alcoholic family. In the workplace, adult children of alcoholics (ACOAs) have recently become acknowledged as a group who face special challenges. The…

A study was conducted to explore the process of learning from television news and the relationship between audio and visual channels. The subjects, 82 undergraduate journalism majors enrolled in five newswriting classes, were randomly assigned to experimental conditions. Newscasts were recorded from evening newscasts aired by networks, and scripts…

Whether or not a short-term intervention program could improve performance on standardized figural analogy and surface development tests was studied through training 10 students from an introductory psychology class with relatively low scores on the figural analogies subtest of the Cognitive Abilities Test. An additional 10 students served as…

Using a map for guiding travel requires: (1) skills in encoding information from a terrain and a map; (2) finding a match between the two; and (3) maintaining the match despite directional shifts from turns on a route. In order to test this analysis, 94 children between the ages of 4 and 6 used maps to locate the route to a goal through a network…

A study investigated the effect of adult correction of grammatical errors during the language learning process. Four girls and four boys, ages 2 and 3, were interviewed individually, tape recorded and asked to repeat an adult sentence exactly. Overt mistakes were corrected either with an overt correction with expansion or with expansion only,…