Web site usability concerns anyone with a Web site to maintain. Libraries, however, are often the biggest offenders in terms of usability. In our efforts to provide users with everything they need for research, we often overwhelm them with sites that are confusing in structure, difficult to navigate, and weighed down with jargon. Dowling College…

A study was conducted to determine whether competently reasoning clinicians (clinical instructors in medical instruction) could identify reasons competently reasoning students would eliminate distractors, and explain how students would reason to select the keyed response when solving multiple-choice items. The think-aloud protocols of clinicians…

This paper describes the implications of constructivism both for what to teach and for how to teach. The first part discusses three approaches on what to teach: (1) relating mathematical knowledge to other knowledge; (2) checking for self-consistency; and (3) putting thinking before facts. The second part is on how to teach based on…

A think-aloud instructional program was developed to help students acquire the ability to monitor their reading comprehension and to employ various strategies to deal with comprehension breakdowns. Several research studies indicate that comprehension monitoring abilities discriminate successful readers from less successful ones and that…

Processes of solving an ill-structured problem were studied. Eight individuals (recent graduates and participants in a teacher education program) learned about a fictitious vehicle, and then designed instruction about it. The individuals were relative novices in instructional design, because of a small amount of professional training in the…

This report examines the composing processes of expert writers to determine which cognitive processes in expository writing produce an opportunity for a creative response. The first section considers how the ill-defined nature of many writing problems and the cognitive processes experts use to solve these problems interact to provide an…

A study examined whether students were able to transfer the learning of a modeled "think-aloud" strategy to comprehension monitoring in other learning situations. Sixty-four eighth grade students in a midwestern town were identified as average proficiency readers based on a cloze test. There were no significant differences among the…

This study assesses the ability of schema theory to address ill-structured problems without becoming unwieldy. Prior to addressing the study proper, the paper reviews the literature on memory for complex phenomena, ill-structured problems, expert-novice differences, administration as problem solving, and assessment of complex learning outcomes.…

This report discusses the importance of presenting qualitative, causally consistent models in the initial stages of learning so that students can gain an understanding of basic electrical circuit concepts and principles that builds on their preexisting ways of reasoning about physical phenomena, and it argues that tutoring environments must help…

The problems of validity and fairness involved in multiple-choice critical thinking tests can be lessened by using verbal reports of examinees' thinking during the process of developing such tests in order to retain only those items which rely on critical thinking skills to obtain the correct answer. Multiple-choice testing can lead to unfair…

Contributing to research delineating the cognitive processes of writers who are revising their own texts after feedback from members of their intended audience, a study (1) determined whether more able writers would be more responsive to their readers' feedback than would less able writers; and (2) verified results of a previous study indicating a…

When students write syntheses in response to a rhetorical task, does the rhetorical nature of the task exert some special influence on the students' composing processes? How do these processes differ? Three case studies, quantitative analyses of papers written by seventeen undergraduates, and a tentative model of a synthesizing process address…

The reading comprehension program described in this lesson introduces the components of think-alouds and text interactions, and helps students to develop the ability to use think-alouds to aid in reading comprehension tasks. During two 45-minute lessons, students will: explore the use of the think-aloud strategy; vocalize interactions with texts;…

This study explored some aspects of reasoning needed to complete science performance assessments, i.e., students' hands-on investigations scored for the scientific justifiability of the findings. The reasoning demands of science performance assessments were studied focusing on three dimensions identified from a previous analysis of data from the…

In this report, we address the following questions: What aspects of information do preservice elementary teachers rely on when performing inductive reasoning? What contexts enable them to perceive the inherent invariant relationships from a finite sample and, thus, formulate viable generalizations? To what extent are they able to justify inductive…