Information drawn from research conducted in a comparative study between middle and high school students is presented. The study was designed to investigate the difference in the analysis of absolute and relativistic generalizations. Data from this research indicate that differences do exist between middle and high school students in this area of…

Educators are beginning to call attention to the failure to integrate right-brain, intuitive, holistic, visual processes into the curriculum. Approaches to right-brain education have characteristically called for the use of slow music, visual imagery, and relaxation techniques. Suggested principles for teaching basic skills include the facts that…

Recognizing that rote drill and practice (rehearsal) has been replaced with game-like teaching formats as a tool for memorization, a study compared the effectiveness of the two methods to teach eight preschoolers to recite their home telephone numbers. In six sessions, children either rehearsed their phone numbers or used small props and rhyming…

The main focus of contemporary research in writing is on developing ideas and on the processes of planning and revision that make this possible. In the first half of this paper, the distinctive strategies used by experts and novices are elaborated. For example, novice writers depend upon having knowledge already assembled in forms ready for…

This manual provides descriptions of five cooperative learning methods: (1) Student Teams-Achievement Divisions (STAD); (2) Teams-Games-Tournaments (TGT); (3) Jigsaw; (4) Team Accelerated Instruction (TAI); and (5) Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition (CIRC). For each of these methods, an overview offers a description of the procedures…

The skills of knowing how to learn and apply information, which have been collectively grouped under the heading "learning management," are becoming increasingly important as society progresses farther into the information age. Because adult learning is usually more self-directed and because adults are largely free to determine their…

Learning is a metaphoric function in which the individual confirms or reorders his sense of reality by relating previous experiences with present ones. Outward Bound, an experiential learning approach, incorporates this insight in its theoretical foundations. The effectiveness of the metaphor is dependent on the extent to which the experience is…

Questions and questioning play a major role in both formal and informal educative processes. They are the means by which a child expresses the desire to understand the world outside and they subsequently become the means by which a teacher assesses whether or not a child has satisfactorily assimilated something. This book considers questions from…

In an attempt to study strategies that college students use to attain high marks in a difficult course, a community college study skills instructor enrolled in a regional geography course and monitored the strategies he used to study for the course. The goals of the study were to determine how knowledge of the criteria was gained, how attention…

Domain-specific knowledge can be processed so that analytical/critical thinking in verbal and written discourse is encouraged in the classroom by using a guided design strategy intended to solve open-ended problems. Each of the four operations in the strategy (state the goal, generate ideas, prepare a plan, and take action) make use of the…

Designed to help students observe and learn about how they individually represent experience and assign meaning, the exercises in this paper are intended for use in courses on intrapersonal communication or in course units on cognitive aspects of communication. The journal exercise is described in terms of its goals, approaches to it, and includes…

The refinement of the cognitive knowledge base was studied through exploration of the transition from novice to expert and the use of an instructional strategy called novice knowledge engineering. Six college freshmen, who were enrolled in an honors physics course, used an expert system to create questions, decisions, rules, and explanations…

The "Future Problem Solving" exercises (originated by E. Paul Torrance at the University of Georgia) can be used as a method to teach literature. The process used in future problem solving entails all the higher level processes, involves both critical and creative thinking, as well as cooperative learning, and lends itself to the…

The study evaluated the communicative abilities of 30 learning disabled and 30 nondisabled children (ages 9-13 years) in two communication tasks. The study also attempted to investigate the relationships among factors believed to influence such abilities and to identify subgroups of disabled children based on profiles derived from the following…

A review of research on the subject of how students learn identifies various techniques that have been used successfully in facilitating learning; e.g., memorization, repetition, review. In discussing the differences between active and passive learning, it is pointed out that tactics used by good students include organizational strategies,…