Parents should realize the importance of being their child's first teacher and should project an attitude of respect in helping children acquire skills while maintaining self-esteem. The five basic tools necessary for teaching children include: nonjudgmental feedback, task analysis, starting with the last step first, prompting, and praise. (JDD)

Forty-nine clients who had been deinstitutionalized into community settings were matched with clients who remained in the institution. In a subsequent assessment, community clients surpassed institutional clients in social and cognitive skills (including reading/writing, quantitative, community orientation, leisure time, vocational, and social…

Precision teaching can accelerate basic skills progress of special needs children. Issues discussed include using probes as performance tests, charting daily progress, using the charted data to modify teaching methods, determining appropriate age levels, assessing the number of students to be precision taught, and carefully allocating time. (JDD)

Describes story impressions, a prereading activity that uses story fragments in the form of clue words and phrases to help readers activate schemata by building anticipatory models of the text prior to reading, then allowing the reader to confirm or modify the model as the details of the actual story are encountered. (SKC)

Describes 10 ideas for using recitation to strengthen reading comprehension, including: (1) what did I just say? (2) one thing I learned today; (3) student-generated test questions; (4) guess what will be on the test; (5) where is it located in the book? (6) teacher show and tell; (7) inquiry training; and (8) what's the big idea? (SKC)

Suggests ways in which students can elaborate upon activities for improving thinking skills to produce interesting and creative poetry. (JC)

Simulated patients can standardize the presentation of a patient problem, and, if the patients are employed in an assessment, the assessment can have an objectivity similar to that of written tests. The results and feasibility of using simulated patients in an assessment are described. (Author/MLW)

Assessment has at two purposes--to improve teaching and learning and to promote greater external accountability. Determining an appropriate assessment approach depends on clear knowledge of what is intended, solid research about available instruments and about the experiences of other institutions, and a diagnosis of the local organizational and…

Discusses current research and personal experience in designing courses in English for academic purposes that help develop generalizable, transferable skills. Helpful research includes: (1) looking at needs and learning as a continuous process; (2) qualitative rather than quantitative studies; and (3) expert-novice juxtaposition. (Author/LMO)

Describes a model for training instructional designers who will work as members of videodisc development teams. This model develops and integrates competencies relating to instructional design, project management, interpersonal skills, storyboarding and flowcharting, programming, video production, and interactive video system knowledge. Three…

Examines the effects on student performance in an undergraduate engineering design course of two techniques designed to engender professional attitudes among student engineers and shift learning responsibility toward the students. Neither the awarding of a prize for the best project work nor Socratic dialog in the classroom significantly affected…

Four experimental reading-treatment classes (n=94) and four control classes (n=100) wrote pre- and post-compositions which were evaluated for overall quality, syntactic density, T-unit length, productivity, and selected grammatical errors. Analysis of results found significant differences in reading skills but no differences in writing skills. The…

Discusses educational uses of microcomputers in context of development theories and models of education and describes the development of a computer-supported writing system for the development of academic skills--a children's newswire service--and its influence on the improvement of low-achieving students' reading and writing skills. (MBR)

Discusses the transition from school to work via what is currently being done by many school counselors and other professionals, and why this assistance for an increasing number of youth has proved ineffective. Outlines some of the underlying basic causes of this transition problem and proposes an alternate approach. (CT)

Describes Phaladelphia's four semiautonomous high school academies designed to provide disadvantaged students with a carefully aligned academic and vocational program and, ultimately, with relevant, marketable job skills. Discusses administration, academics, integration of academic and vocational courses, career education and counseling, work…