The Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) technique allows students to be engaged in course material outside of the classroom by answering web-based questions. The responses are summarized and presented to students in class with a follow-up active learning exercise. College students enrolled in an introductory-level general education geoscience course were…

This theoretical paper examines current practice in work-based studies where recognition of prior unaccredited work is normally limited to around 50% of the total programme. The basis of this limiting concept is challenged and consideration is given to a number of factors that have contributed to it. Comparison is made with the current practice of…

This study sought to determine the effects of prior knowledge on the achievement of undergraduates in an economics course at the Open University of the Netherlands (OuN). A total of 49 law and 39 economics students were given 4 instruments to test prior knowledge of economics, presented with a learning unit from the course "Economics and…

A study investigated the contributions of phonemic knowledge, prior knowledge, and listening comprehension to the reading comprehension of elementary age children. Three theoretical perspectives were followed aiming to specify developmental characteristics of these variables to reading comprehension: (1) contributions of prior knowledge should…

One fifth grade student, Martha, was encouraged to develop her informal ratio and proportion strategies during a 6-month teaching experiment. The challenges Martha faced during the teaching experiment are described. The current study supports the claim made by Kaput and West (1994) that initial instruction on ratio and proportion based on…

A study investigated the role of prior knowledge in ambiguous text interpretation by directly measuring readers' knowledge of, and level of involvement with, three distinct topical domains that could be assigned during reading of an ambiguous passage. Subjects, 52 athletes of average or above average reading ability competing in one of three…

A study examined the extent to which common knowledge structures and the presence of common performance components are important factors in reasoning. The eye fixations of 37 college students were recorded as they solved four types of complex inductive reasoning tasks: (1) verbal analogies, (2) figural analogies, (3) verbal series completions, and…

A study was conducted to investigate the effects of high and low relevant text underlining and annotating (making margin notes or other marks to indicate important material) on test performance. The subjects, 67 college freshmen, were randomly assigned to one of four experimenter-generated conditions: (1) high relevant underlining; (2) high…

Prior knowledge of the content of a passage should reduce the effort required to encode the passage, and facilitate its recall. The results of two experiments on the effects of prior knowledge upon comprehension of simple technical prose are presented. The procedure was to collect ratings of the amount of prior knowledge for individual passage…

The main experience of an ideal reader while reading a text is an "envisionment" of that text, a representation in the reader's mind of the content of the text. According to this view the envisionment grows and sometimes changes as the reader progresses through the text, and the ideal reader not only updates and supplements the…

Psycholinguistics, with its emphasis on language processes rather than products, is particularly compelling when applied to the search for underlying connections between reading and writing. One such connection is best stated in the following propositions about writing and learning to write: (1) at no time are the acts of reading and writing as…

Accreditation issues raised by the use of educational technology not being substantially different from those raised during the decade of the seventies by the nontraditional education movement, there are several lessons about accreditation issues which are applicable to both movements. For example, credentialing and accreditation issues are…

Examined the influence of familiarity with peers on social cognition in second and fourth grade children who segmented a videotape of the behavioral stream of a peer. Children given prior information broke the stream into fewer, larger segments. Prior information affected fourth graders more than second graders. (SKC)

A survey of 23 faculty active in the Adult Liberal Studies program examined faculty attitudes about older students in higher education. Faculty generally felt that adults have better skills and more cognitive skills than traditional students. Faculty also were pleased with the structure of the adult program. (CH)

Discusses five ways to determine the amount and quality of prior knowledge children bring to a topic: (1) free recall tasks, (2) word association tasks, (3) structured questions, (4) recognition tasks, and (5) unstructured discussion. (FL)