The current climate for excellence in education has set off a wave of reactions, especially in the demand for accountability based on the assessment of students' academic performance. The effects on one school district's summer school curriculum, and its implications for teachers, are discussed. (JL)

This is a discussion about the role of a case or authentic scenario in an online learning environment. Using authentic cases for intentional learning promotes effective, cognitive, and affective transfer between learning space and performance space. Creating an online case event provides an opportunity for learning design professionals to use…

This report focuses on secondary schools and a variety of youth projects in eight countries--Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Norway, United Kingdom--so as to provide a better understanding of what motivates youth to learn. The text is based on reports prepared by experts appointed by each participating country, in addition to…

The purpose of this study was to determine if learning orientation, time, and learning environment accounted for significant variance, effects, and interactions. The investigator developed a course for adults, entitled "Discovering the Web," presented it in three World Wide Web learning environments, and provided adapted solutions for audiences…

Describes the integration of Web resources as instructional and learning tools in an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) class in Taiwan. Highlights include challenges and advantages of using the Web; learners' perceptions; intentional and incidental learning; disorientation and cognitive overload; and information seeking as problem-solving. A…

Analyzed self-regulatory strategies of goal setting and goal striving in 3 experiments involving 55 German middle school students, 20 German young adults, and 39 German college students. Results show that contrasting fantasy about a desired future with present reality and forming implementation intentions are effective self-regulatory strategies…

The effects of visual grouping strategies involving animated and static graphic presentations on learning were studied. Also studied was the ability of students to learn a scientific rule presented incidentally in an animated sequence in the hope of replicating results from previous research. A total of 39 fourth graders participated in an…

This technical report describes a series of three studies designed to instruct students in the relationship between texts, comprehension questions, and two sources of answer information--the text to which a given question refers and their own background knowledge. The focus of the technical report is on individual differences in the amount and…

The Research and Evaluation Branch of the Los Angeles Unified School District presents a bulletin to help prepare students to do their best on achievement tests. The bulletin is divided into five sections. After an introduction, section 2, "Characteristics of Today's Standardized Achievement Tests" discusses test content, test format,…

This project examined the hypothesis that different background experiences associated with cultural grouping may lead to differences in test-taking strategies which result in score differences extraneous to the abilities the test is intended to measure. Its purposes were to confirm (or disconfirm) the cultural differences hypothesis and to provide…

Fifty-two college students, enrolled in an introductory psychology course, served as subjects for this study, the purposes of which were: (1) to determine whether supplying subjects with a list of behavioral objectives causes them to focus their learning efforts on the specified behaviors to the extent that attention to non-specified behaviors is…

The results of this investigation are generally supportive of the hypothesis that the learning of prior presented high-order concepts and rules can result in both a facilitation and acceleration of the learning of meaningfully related subject-matter concepts and logical operations. (Author)

Prepublication copies of an extensive test familiarization booklet were sent to a random sample of Scholastic Aptitude Test candidates. The booklet had little, if any, effect on test scores, but it did alter examinees' tendencies to omit questions and improved their confidence with various aspects of test taking. (Author/PN)

Twenty-eight normal and 28 learning disabled children were given the Bender-Gestalt Test under instructional sets of low (standard) attention or high attention. Results failed to support the hypothesis that high attention instructions would lead to differential recall performance of the diagnostic groups.

In three experiments, memory for intentionally encoded words was compared with memory for encodings, induced by asking semantic, phonemic, or surface questions. Subjects were second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade students, and junior and senior high school students. (Author/MP)