The main thrust of American education has been cognitively oriented. Recent research on the human brain suggests that such orientation is a general function of only one hemisphere of the brain, the left. Because of the close relationships among speech, language, thinking, reasoning, and the higher mental functions, the left brain hemisphere…

The process model of reading suggests that even the effective reader makes recurring regressions to lower levels of functioning when faced with unfamiliar topics or texts. The gradual formulation of new linguistic and cognitive structures necessitated by the task of reading is similar to the acquisition of language, and the process model suggests…

A project was conducted at the University of Goteborg in Sweden to study how students of statistics make use of their knowledge when they solve statistical problems and how this knowledge utilization can be improved. The initial study objectives were to identify deficiencies and limitations pertaining to students' knowledge utilization and to…

Fourteen studies were reviewed whose findings indicate that learner control of certain presentation characteristics interacts with certain learner characteristics. Thus, learner control is not a panacea for accomodating individual differences. Instead, some kinds of individual differences probably should be taken into account by teachers and…

The increase in adult college students who have been away from formal education for several years and who are seeking degrees to match the status level they have achieved in business requires a specially organized composition course. Two strategies will keep the course organization and content professional, yet meet individual students' needs in…

Reporting on the construction and validation of instruments for the evaluation of students in the first stages of reading and spelling instruction, this paper first discusses how teachers themselves can determine a student's learning progress with the help of evaluation instruments. Distinguishing between formative evaluation and diagnostic…

The paper focuses on networking, a process of identifying and understanding the relationships among concepts in prose passage, as a learning strategy for deaf college students. It is explained that students using the technique perform three basic overlapping processes, one of which, identification and understanding of concept relationships, is the…

The school seeks to enable its students to understand and cope with the maladies of the times, to define and clarify the values and principles that should guide action, and to develop personal behavior consistent with these values and principles. These goals can best be attained through systematic instruction in critical thinking, for these skills…

A group of 144 kindergarten and third grade students heard stories in which the information necessary to infer the protagonist's motives was varied as to its form and location in a story sequence. In all story variations, the semantic content of the information was held constant. All children completed three tasks: a moral judgment concerning the…

Reading is comprehension, it is a complex network of interrelated skills, and it involves several levels of thinking, but in a holistic rather than in a molecular response to the text. The practice of reading based on this theoretical understanding involves identifying levels of comprehension; noting that levels of comprehending are not strictly…

This paper outlines two alternate ways in which concepts are acquired, known as "top down" and "bottom up". "Bottom up" refers to learning the members of a category and then extracting their similarities or differences, the rule or criterial attributes used to make the categorization. In the "top down"…

A persistent problem in aptitude-treatment interaction (ATI) research has been the need for a better conceptualization of instructional treatments. The concerns are important in the analysis of instructional treatments: the importance of considering the psychological processes called upon by the instructional treatment, and the ecological validity…

This abstract bibliography cites recent ERIC documents and journal articles concerning the differentiated functioning of the brain hemispheres. Entries include resumes from Resources in Education (RIE), October 1973 through December 1977, and citations from Current Index to Journals in Education (CIJE), November 1974 through December 1977.…

Investigated was the relationship between proportional thinking and students' ability to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of concepts related to simple machines, structure of matter, and equivalent fractions. The study involved a random sample of 136 ninth-grade physical science students. Each student's proportional reasoning skills were…

A "release from proactive inhibition (PI) task" method examines the masculine-feminine connotation of a word as an attribute of encoding in memory. Male (N=45) and female (N=61) subjects were given four trials, each trial consisting of three occupations with all masculine or all feminine connotations, a subtraction task, and a recall…