This booklet presents a reading and writing intervention program for French Canadian preschool children with developmental delays, to be implemented by parents or collaboratively by parents and teachers. The program calls for children to have frequent contacts with written language, in order to facilitate the development of a positive attitude…

This newsletter presents five articles focusing on the social development of infants and very young children. The first article, "Sympathetic Behavior in Very Young Children," by Lois Barclay Murphy, gives examples of early sympathetic behavior, traces the development of sympathy, identifies individual patterns of sympathetic response,…

A classification scheme for multimedia interaction is described based on the degree of control and type of cognitive engagement experienced by learners in prescriptive, democratic, and cybernetic independent learning environments. Reactive, proactive, and mutual levels of interaction and their associated functions and transactions are discussed.…

This paper offers a synthesis of research on cooperative learning in small groups. The main challenge for teachers who utilize cooperative learning is to stimulate the type of interaction desired according to their teaching objective. A generalization regarding student interactions is that if students are not taught differently, they will tend to…

This book examines the relationship between teachers (facilitators) and students who are themselves education professionals and who are participating in professional development courses. The methodology, which is based on a combination of interaction and reflection, is outlined in Chapter 1. Examined in Chapter 2 are the roles of the didactic,…

This paper discusses the three types of online learning-- asynchronous collaborative learning, sametime collaborative learning, and self-paced learning--and how these modes are supported by the Lotus LearningSpace product. The following requirements for distributed learning technology are then considered: (1) flexibility, specifically the…

Student interaction and computer-based communication tool appropriation patterns were examined in two different communication assignments requiring active use of computer-based communication tools. University students completed either: a set of communication assignments and activities with the instructor as sole audience; or a set of communication…

This paper presents findings from two studies on the use of computer mediated communication (CMC) in distance learning courses in higher education administration. The first study compared differences between students (n=17) in a face-to-face (F2F) classroom and students (n=7) taking the same course using CMC. It analyzed differences in interaction…

This paper describes the features of the 1996 version of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) called CALAT. The architecture of CALAT is an extension of conventional World Wide Web systems, consisting of an ITS kernel on the server side and a multimedia viewer on the client side. The viewer control system is designed to achieve both educationally…

This document contains four papers from a symposium on change processes in organizations. "Mid-stream Corrections: Decisions Leaders Make during Organizational Change Processes" (David W. Frantz) analyzes three organizational leaders to determine whether and how they take corrective actions or adapt their decision-making processes when…

As the need for distance education grows, requirements for the development of high-speed network-based real-time distance learning systems increases. MHEG-5 is the fifth part of the MHEG (Multimedia and Hypermedia information coding Experts Group) standard, and it defines a final-form representation for application interchange. This paper…

This paper describes IRI (Interactive Remote Instruction), a computer-based system built at Old Dominion University (Virginia) in order to support distance education. The system is based on the concept of a virtual classroom where students at different locations have the same synchronous class experience, using networked computers to communicate…

This investigation examined middle-school students' attitudes toward and abilities to benefit from small group computer-based instruction (CBI) as a function of their academic aptitudes, gender, and learning situations. Two studies were conducted with different tasks. Seventy-six seventh graders (39 high aptitude and 37 low aptitude) from a…

This manual was developed in order to study the sociomoral atmospheres of three kindergarten classrooms. Previous research by Robert Selman et al. conceptualized developmental levels of interpersonal understanding in terms of two types of experiences: negotiation, where the developmental goal is identity separate from others; and shared…

This study investigated differences in freshmen to senior student general education gains across institutions of higher education, with varying patterns of general education requirements using a mixed-effect structural equation model. The subjects were 6,409 students at 34 colleges and universities nationwide. Study procedures used American…