This brief overview of some aspects of human development aims to enable paraprofessionals (teachers' aides) to work with teachers and children with greater understanding and effectiveness. Aspects discussed include heredity, IQ scores and learning ability assessment, principles of development, and principles of learning. (ED)

The purpose of this paper is to review some of the current research in "modeling" or "imitation" learning that supports basic elements of social learning theory, its effects on overt behavior, and its relationship to subjects' self-evaluations. An attempt is made to point out the theoretical discrepancies that exist between social learning, social…

This study examined the effectiveness of the Science Curriculum Improvement Study (SCIS) materials for visually handicapped children. Fourteen students, ranging in age from 9 to 19 and working in small groups with student teachers, received science instruction using the adapted version of the SCIS program. Control subjects were matched closely on…

A course in macro economics, designed to teach economic concepts and to improve student attitudes toward the discipline, is described. It is divided into 10 weeks of core study, using a self-instructional package, and 4 weeks for student options. Objectives of the core study are application of economic concepts to current events, feedback through…

The purpose of this research was to determine the relative roles of experience/learning and selected visual aptitude factors on the ability to detect and identify indications of defects in X-ray film of welds and other materials. Penetrameter Detection and Defect Identification Tests were developed to measure the ability of radiographic film…

Reported is a study to investigate certain relationships between a student's participation in traditional or "new science" and subsequent participation, performance, and perception of the study of science during junior college. The differences sought were only in terms of the objectives of the study and encompassed such variables as subsequent…

This study was designed to simulate some aspects of classroom verbal interaction and to investigate their cognitive effects on students, using cognitive theory as the theoretical rationale. Subject-determined verbalization of correct cues was crossed with external sources of verbalized correct cues in a multivariable design in which sex was…

The research experiments on relational learning in young children contained in this report were guided by two major goals: (1) to examine the extent of conceptual transfer in preschool children, and (2) to explore the relation of both "acquisition" and "transfer" to chronological development. The performance of preschool…

This study investigated the spontaneous use of verbal mediators in discrimination learning, the transfer of mediators to a free recall task, and the effects of a pretraining task on performance. The discrimination tasks required nursery school children (80) to: (1) sort three instances each of two different concepts in a conceptually consistent…

Research investigated three topics. These were: 1) the effect of paragraph organization on free recall of sentences and on the selection of clustering strategies; 2) how persons differing in subjective organization differ on recall and strategy selection; and 3) the relation between subjective organization and other cognitive abilities. Three…

Prescriptive teaching was reported to be the subject of an institute (August 1972) which showed teachers how to use a conceptual model of the learning system, how to help children develop self concept so as to overcome maladaptive behavior, and how to write educational procedures for individualized instruction. The conceptual model was described…

This curriculum is designed primarily for individualized classrooms where the teacher is working with an assistant, but has also been proven effective in traditional classrooms and in remedial situations. It is designed to test and teach children the basic abilities (readiness skills) assumed by the present primary-grade reading, writing,…

A review of Project Themis, which focused on the computer as a teacher, is presented. Descriptions of research into four related areas of strategy are first provided. These research areas are: 1) learner strategies focusing on the internal cognitive and personality processes of the learner who is involved in computer-based learning tasks; 2)…

This review of recent Piagetian research in mathematics education is divided into three parts. In the first part the author states the assumptions upon which the remainder of the paper rests. These assumptions are based on Piaget's theory of cognitive development and he presents six relevant points. The second part is a review of recent research…

A basic unsolved problem in science is that of understanding learning, the process by which people and machines use their experience in a situation to guide future action in similar situations. The ideas of Piaget, Pavlov, Hull, and other learning theorists, as well as previous heuristic programing models of human intelligence, stimulated this…