For use by teachers in helping students become better writers, this booklet describes and illustrates cognitive mapping, a prewriting technique that helps students combine their verbal and visual skills in order to produce ideas and to plan stories, plays, reports, or essays. The first section of the booklet discusses the interrelations between…

A study tested two hypotheses aimed at explaining the "self-fulfilling prophesy" that results when students are divided into ability group systems. The differential instruction hypothesis explains achievement differentials produced by grouping systems in terms of the differential instruction received by students. The peer differentials…

Research is attempting to examine the causes and effects of incestual child abuse and has discovered more complicated temporary and long-term repercussions than previously suspected. Fifteen subjects in a residential facility participated in a study to examine the self-concept and intellect of girls who had been victims of incest. Their scores on…

Two studies were conducted to determine whether the consonant errors displayed by readers with severe reading disabilities are the result of phonetic rather than visual substitutions. In the first study, the reading and spelling performance of three groups of readers with average IQs but with reading levels two years below grade level, was…

This study investigates the relationship between an examinee's test anxiety level, degree of person fit, and ability. Three major types of person fit indices measure the degree of unusual response patterns: norm comparison indices; goodness-of-fit indices; and extended indices. Five different person fit indices were calculated for the results of…

The 13 articles in this information packet are intended to assist individuals involved in developing plans to improve student thinking within a school or a school district. The topics discussed include (1) the need to improve student thinking, (2) obstacles that stand in the way of teaching thinking skills, (3) practical approaches to improving…

Two studies were conducted to extend the application and explore the parameters of the concept tree and rational set generator instructional design techniques. The first study was conducted with high school English students. Results indicated that students who studied the concept tree performed no differently on the classification tests than…

A study was conducted to examine the influence of topic familiarity on good and poor readers' ability to identify and use important information in expository texts. Subjects were 56 eighth grade students and 37 adults. After indicating their familiarity with the topics of eight experimental passages using J. P. Guilford's method of paired…

This paper examines the relationship between strategies for recall of verbal material and the reading ability of 10-to-13-year-old children. Sixty-five fifth and sixth graders, whose reading levels were determined by the Gates-MacGinitie Comprehension Test (1964), were given an orally presented word-string repetition task. While performance on…

To examine the relationship between television viewing and early school achievement, children's quantitative and verbal test scores were correlated with parental responses to a questionnaire concerning the television viewing habits of their children. The sample consisted of 202 kindergarten children and their parents from two suburban school…

Three experiments, in which subjects read passages of variable readability, measured "cognitive capacity usage" (the attention level to reading material) by recording by subjects reaction times in a secondary task (responding to a "click"). The data indicated that the easy texts filled cognitive capacity more completely than the difficult texts,…

In a study of the way adult basic education (ABE) students answer different kinds of questions about what they read, 221 students were asked to read ten passages during a ten-week period and to answer ten questions about each passage immediately after reading it. Each set of questions included three dealing with facts, three dealing with word…

Two hundred Honolulu-area students from the fourth, fifth, eighth, and ninth grades participated in a study that examined the variables effects of five selected factors (developmental level, sex, reading ability, adult intervention, and variation in film content/form) on the ability of two age groups (nine and ten year old children and thirteen…

Oral language is used before written language, according to this paper, which contends that the acquisition of literacy is merely an extension of natural language learning for all children. This view of literacy development as natural is distinguished from the views of those that think language is innate; the naturalness of children learning to…

This study compared the rapid word processing abilities of groups of students in college, fourth grade, second grade, and kindergarten to see if there is a developmental pattern in such skill development, and to see if phonics training should emphasize either letters and the orthographic rules that create words or letter clusters (common words)…