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…

This paper presents a new European teaching model based on ideas and methods of Socrates, Jean Piaget, and Lev S. Vygotsky. The starting point for this new model was the use of Socrates' dialectical method in teaching 906 primary and secondary school students the reduplication of a square. Results of this exercise were compared with Piaget's and…

This book presents a theory of how adults learn by making meaning of their experiences. Chapter 1 gives an overview of an emerging transformation theory of adult learning, compares it with other theories of adult learning, and describes the dynamics of the process through which one makes meaning of one's experience. Chapter 2 examines the way…

The Self-Knowledge Inventory of Lifelong Learning Strategies (SKILLS) was developed to measure adult learning strategies in real-life learning situations. SKILLS consists of a series of 12 scenarios from real-world situations that reflect Shirk's (1990) nine general categories of learning for real-life situations and that necessitate various types…

Students must have uninterrupted periods of time to process information, to reflect on what has been said, observed, or done, and to consider what their personal responses will be. After at least three seconds of uninterrupted silence, a significant number of positive outcomes occur for students and teachers. Students are more effective in…

Presenting the diagnostic teaching units for grades 7, 8, and 9 social studies, this handbook is intended to be used along with the companion handbook 1, "Evaluating Students' Learning and Communication Processes: Integrating Diagnostic Evaluation and Instruction." The student activities of the diagnostic teaching units in the handbook…

A study investigated acquisition of three independent yet simulatneously produced morphological systems in American Sign Language (ASL): the linguistic use of space, use of classifiers, and inflections for aspect, all information incorporated into the production of a sign. Subjects were 30 deaf children with severe or profound prelingual hearing…