Six tips for increasing student problem-solving skills are offered in this teacher fact sheet. Puzzles and simulations matched to student mental maturity and general knowledge are recommended as activities for helping students think more flexibly and practice higher order thinking skills. In addition, four suggestions are given for controlling…

Project Youth, an eight-week workshop for poor minority youths, used theatre exercises to improve participants' communication and self-presentation skills in order to improve their ability to work with others. To evaluate the effectiveness of the program, a 2-phase study was conducted using a sample of participants (N=32) from 15 to 21 years old.…

The paper describes a system used in Nebraska in which vocational rehabilitation specialists determine who is a high need client and develop programs via a social-ecological or "person-environment" perspective. A high need client is defined as an individual who will require considerable staff support, intervention, and time. A three-phase study…

Assessment and rehabilitation of juvenile offenders has been enhanced by the identification of several cognitive and behavioral dimensions on which offenders differ from non-offenders. To investigate the influence of social skills training on locus of control, self-esteem, and observed behavior, 27 adolescent male offenders, aged 12-17,…

Student work experiences provide a great potential for broadening job competencies beyond the required technical knowledge and skills. Some of the parts of this "other half" of job competency involve attitudes and interpersonal relationships on the job. Community-centered methodologies for achieving total job competency are proposed. (BP)

Talking and listening form the foundation for the development of reading and writing in this informal classroom curriculum. (CS)

Issues pertaining to thinking skills are discussed in an attempt to clarify what thinking skills are and their components, how they function and how they can be developed in the teaching-learning environment. Chapter 1 reviews the definitions of thinking skills. These definitions are selected from the current literature on education and…

Listening remains generally unappreciated while being the communicative skill most used and essential to the human condition. There is no name for the condition of being unable to listen, but the term "illistenacy" could be used. An individual who can hear but cannot consciously attend, understand, and respond to non-written messages in…

Because analogical reasoning plays a major role in content area reading comprehension, teachers should learn to teach analogy-solving skills and to identify the kinds of difficulties some elementary students will have in solving them. Analogies are statements of relationships wherein one term is similar to another term. Relationships in analogy…

This study examined the effects of the Child Development Project, an elementary school program designed to enhance prosocial development on children's peer relations and social adjustment. Research has focused on a longitudinal cohort of children that entered three program schools in kindergarten in the fall of 1982, and completed sixth grade in…

Word processors can enhance the reading and writing skills of underprepared college students in a special course combining reading and writing. Word processors may serve such a course in many ways: (1) storing and retrieving students' own unpublished resource materials; (2) moving large blocks of writing at the flick of a finger; (3) serving as…

The Alternative Freshman Year (AFY) program instituted at a community college extension of an eastern university can serve as a model for other developmental education programs. The program, now in its fourth year, helps to upgrade the language and math skills of academically and emotionally unprepared students. Students are admitted to the…

A conceptual framework derived from formal and behavioral theories was used to describe and evaluate a sample of the best developed programs for teaching decision making to adolescents. The internal validity of the programs was evaluated in terms of the adequacy of their coverage of the normatively prescribed steps to good decision making. The…

After 2 years of a 5-year pilot project to develop approaches to strengthen basic competencies of students enrolled in vocational programs in Oklahoma, two of the projects were reviewed. The study sought to: (1) document the incidence and level of basic skills instruction, along with the teaching methods and materials used, in the vocational and…

This manual, designed for teachers of Spanish as a second language, contains visual aids to illustrate certain grammatical concepts and related vocabulary. The manual consists of 30 tear-out blackline masters, each containing one to six separate cartoon pictures, to be used for classroom or homework activities in any sequence. Accompanying each…