While they demonstrate some ability to critically analyze the more obvious forms of deceptive weight-loss advertising, many girls do not recognize how advertising evokes emotional responses or how visual and narrative techniques are used to increase identification in weight-loss advertising. This study examined how girls aged 9-17 years…

Studies from information-processing and language comprehension research have reported that background knowledge facilitates reading and writing. By comparing Chinese language development of heritage students who had home background in Chinese language and culture with those who did not, this study found that heritage learners did significantly…

This article is based on a study conducted in a teacher education classroom in an attempt to 1) recognize and acknowledge teacher candidates' prior beliefs and experiences; 2) formalize the connection between theories of child development and learning and teacher's implicit beliefs; and 3) encourage teacher candidates to reflect on their own…

This report explores the development of modular education and its application in the Dutch Open University. The origins of modular education are examined from the first applications in American higher education and the development of electives and the credit system to the role of modular instruction as the basis of higher education curriculum.…

While research concerning feedback and cooperative learning is prevalent in educational literature, there has been little systematic research to support whether various types of feedback in cooperative learning situations can affect student performance. This study examines possible interactions among different types of computer-delivered feedback…

This report deals with the question of obtaining insights into states of prior knowledge and exploring knowledge state tests and knowledge state profiles. The first part introduces a few basic terms important in the context of prior knowledge state. Evaluation and the validity, reliability, and usefulness of tests are considered in a prior…

Although ample research has investigated critical-thinking skills among college students from state-supported higher education institutions of nonreligious affiliation, virtually none has examined critical thinking among students enrolled in private Christian colleges, nor the effect of prior educational setting on students' critical-thinking…

A simple, but useful, handout given to mothers of young children can greatly increase the likelihood that they will present aspects of emergent literacy in their homes. The concept of emergent literacy states that all literacy learning begins in infancy and proceeds forward from that point, and that all of the literacy skills of oral language,…

This book is the fourth in a series aiming to promote international exchange of ideas, experiences, and studies relating to technical and vocational education. The introduction reviews traditional practices in assessment and chapter 2 highlights the connections between assessment and learning, emphasizing that assessment is the most significant…

This paper attempts to create a vision of what it would be like to teach for understanding, to adopt the view of learner as constructor of his or her own understanding, and to share in the creation of an environment for reconstructing students' understanding and reasoning. Such a program is based on assumptions about the cognition of learners,…

A model, derived from the literature, is presented of the influence of learners' preconceptions on the amount of mental effort invested in learning from television. The proposed model suggests that learners' preconceptions are influenced by the characteristics of the media, the characteristics of the task, and the characteristics of the learner.…

Many preservice teachers confront their own lack of confidence and actual mathematics phobia for the first time in their math procedures classes. This study was designed to explore the application of a confluent education intervention, a model based on the premise that all learning is accompanied by an affective as well as a cognitive component,…

An ethnographic study conducted in Hong Kong investigated commonalities in Chinese and English that might be used to elicit prior learning in the first language to enhance learning in English as a Second Language (ESL), for both language and content area instruction. Specifically, it: (1) examined Hong Kong students' exposure to and interaction…

A study analyzed think-aloud protocols to investigate and describe what readers who are developing proficiency do as they read. Subjects, three sixth-grade middle-school boys (with grade point averages of 3.0-3.5 on a 4-point scale) from a small West Virginia suburb, read aloud 16 text sections (from one to four sentences in length), thought aloud…

This case study examined how three white preservice teachers were similar and dissimilar in terms of their racial attitudes and beliefs, their prior interracial experiences, and certain personal characteristics. Participants had taken a multicultural education course and had been part of a larger study of teacher candidates' attitudes about…