The experience-oriented approach to early childhood learning assumes that the way children see, understand, and conceptualize is more basic than skills and knowledge, and that preschools should systematically work on developing children's awareness of different phenomena in the world around them. Content areas in this approach foster children's:…

Students begin their college studies with a set of epistemological beliefs about what they think knowledge is and how they think it is learned; for most students, the experience of college alters these beliefs in fundamental, transformative ways. This study explores the relation between epistemological beliefs, motivation, and cognition in two…

The review of research presented here examines studies based on Benjamin Whorf's hypothesis of linguistic relativity, which states that cultural traditions encourage certain types of thinking and are reinforced by structural characteristics of particular languages. Studies were selected for inclusion if: (1) the subjects were learners and speakers…

A case study of the acquisition of Hausa as the first language by a child focuses on acquisition of interrogatives. The subject was a male child aged 25-60 months. Data were drawn from observation and elicitation. Three phases of acquisition were distinguished. Strategies adopted by the child appeared to reflect realities and contacts in his daily…

The research circle is a form of cooperation between trade unions and researchers that is spreading all over Sweden and beyond its national borders. The research circles described in this book were arranged jointly by SKAF (Swedish Municipal Workers' Union) and the Uppsala University Department of Education. A research circle is a study circle in…

Although English teachers have implicitly been aware of the functions of writing, they may not always have explored the ways writing can be used to enhance learning: learning of content, of skills, and of self. Arthur Applebee noted that English teachers were most likely to stress personal and imaginative experiences in their writing assignments,…

A longitudinal study investigated the development of children's writing over a 5-year period by examining how children use physical and symbolic representation systems that they have constructed to express meaning, how the meaning they intend is related to the social context and function of written language, and how this constructive process of…

This study examined the effects of episodic-mapping, traditional notetaking, and rereading on eighth-grade students' recall of historical text. Episodic-maps are a kind of notetaking procedure that requires students to represent ideas from a text in the form of a graphic diagram. As predicted, both episodic-mapping and traditional notetaking…

This book is intended to help teachers and college students promote more effective learning through development of critical thinking and reflective learning skills. Part 1 is about theory; it consists of five chapters, which include an overview of the book's themes as well as discussions of learning philosophies and models, learning theories, the…

This paper presents a model for implementation of behavior therapies in adventure programs that use Group Adventure Initiative Tasks (GAITs) to promote personal development. Behavior therapies include various techniques and processes based in learning and pedagogical theory and used to promote changes in behavioral responses to environmental…

This paper describes the characteristics of microworlds and discusses the basis of their use as educational tools. The power of a microworld as a learning tool is based in the philosophy of constructivism, the Piagetian principle of equilibrium, mental models, and intrinsic motivation. Research results of educational microworld studies appear to…

A study attempted to (1) define acoustically the learner's progress in acquisition of a set of phonological features, specifically interlingual differences in the voice onset time of voiceless stop consonants and the number of taps produced when attempting to produce the Spanish phoneme /r/ (trill); (2) determine if and at what stage of…

This study addresses the inability of eleventh-grade students to critically analyze and evaluate literature used in the classroom. The study was conducted in a medium-sized rural community in northern Illinois. Sixteen teachers and 24 students participated in the study. Surveys, analysis of standardized test scores, past performance in English…

This document contains four papers from a symposium on assessing the learning organization. "Measuring Organizational Learning: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis of an Organization Survey" (Jamie Callahan Fabian, Ralph O. Mueller, Dail L. Fields) compares two models for measuring four constructs inherent to Schwandt's model of…

"Text Sets" is a curricular strategy that highlights intertextuality, the process of searching for connections among reading texts and personal experiences. The strategy consists of gathering groups of related books and engaging small groups of students in a discussion of how the books interrelate. Three teachers assembled Text Sets for…