This paper reviews theories of play and discusses the relationship between children's play and social development. The paper begins with a discussion of an educator's concern that young children in modern China have decreased the amount of their play due to pressure from the family to acquire academic skills. The review of major theories of play…

This paper contains the text of four papers presented at a seminar held to develop issues for future research in the science and mathematics curriculum area. In "The Nature of Pupils' Naive Conceptions in Science," Rosalind Driver discusses spontaneous reasoning about force and motion, spontaneous reasoning in other domains of…

This document reports on a study which focused on improving the flexibility and responsiveness of vocational education and training provision in Great Britain by producing a plan for information technology-based open learning (ITOL) provision. In the first section, the ITOL model is described through three scenarios. Benefits to learners such as…

Arguing that educators may be facing their greatest challenge in decades as they seek to integrate critical thinking techniques into the computer-assisted instruction (CAI) environment, this paper discusses the crucial importance of critical thinking and explores some potential adverse effects of CAI in this area. A brief historic overview of…

Independent investigations have demonstrated consistent relationships among family communication, cognitive style, and media behavior when any two of these variables are associated in the same study. The evidence so far supports the hypotheses that family communication patterns are associated with different strategies for dealing with persons and…

This 1984-85 annual report from the Scottish Council for Research in Education (SCRE) contains lists of officers, members, principal officials and staff; the chairman's report for 1984-85; a summary of projects in tabular form and a series of brief reports on projects; a note on overseas counsultancies; a list of SCRE publications; a note on…

This paper reconsiders some of the ways in which black American psychology has been theorized and researched, and proposes some alternative models. Black personality is in part an adaptation to the political contours of racism, the cumulative representation of the effects of racism over four centuries. However, the only systematic statements of…

This brief review of how computers are currently being used and studied in the schools stresses ways in which computers will be used to enhance learning and development, and the need for research on computer learning to consider the multi-functional uses of computers in various contexts, instead of seeing it as a medium with a single effect on…

The literature on adult, vocational, and distance education was reviewed to identify areas needing research in order to guide decisions on the use of distance delivery in adult vocational education in Minnesota. Literature on participation in and barriers to participation in adult education was reviewed as was literature on the clientele served by…

To assess the nature and importance of family support and education programs which have increased in number during the last decade, this prepared statement addresses three questions: (1) What is known about the ways in which context, defined as factors outside the nuclear family, affects a family's capacity to rear its children and build a…

Rural schools, which comprise 67% of the nation's school systems, experience distinct educational environments and have unique strengths and weaknesses. Quality research to assess the effectiveness of rural education has been hampered by inconsistently applied definitions of "rural" and inadequate data to compare rural and urban…

Noting that research and theory building in the area of listening have evolved from a variety of disciplines, this paper examines the contributions to listening theory made by humanistic psychology. The paper first offers an overview of humanistic psychology, examining some of the basic assumptions and postulates that serve as a foundation for…

Begun in June 1984, the national study utilized questionnaires from 461 rural education researchers and practitioners to provide the first empirical data for prioritization of rural education research needs. Since conducting and supporting rural education research are clearly federal functions, the study was prepared for dissemination to federal…

This paper suggests that research in applied linguistics in Great Britain has recently had little impact on the learning and teaching of foreign languages and that new priorities for relevant research in second language learning and teaching need to be proposed. The objective of the new research would be to ensure that language skills be available…

Recent research has focused on the faulty implications emitted by factual television accounts of real events, while television news has been described as a pseudo-reality created from the ongoing flow of events. Furthermore, the convenient metaphorical language of television news often creates images of reality in such a way that the reality and…