This paper describes the instructional design activities used to create ThinkAbout, a video series meant to teach fifth and sixth graders skills essential for learning, i.e., inquiring, analyzing, synthesizing, seeking alternatives, and creative problem solving. Two basic tenets or underpinning statements served as guidelines for the development…

A new series of instructional television programs designed for fifth and sixth grades, will reinforce basic skills while helping students learn to solve real-world problems. (Author/MLF)

Using 280 5th graders as subjects, an experiment was carried out to answer the following questions: (1) do certain indentified television formats have effects on cognition? (2) Is mastery of various cognitive skills correlated with extraction of knowledge from a television message which employs the corresponding format? It was hypothesized that:…

Despite initial high expectations for the impact of television on classroom teaching, quantitative studies conducted during the 1950's and 60's indicate that television instruction is not significantly different from conventional methods in its effect on student achievement. In 1972 the City School District of East Chicago, Indiana, introduced the…

Multi-Media Detectives was a project where fifth graders in three Michigan school districts were linked to a children's bulletin board. The goal was to have students "think global but link local" by using online resources to search for local facts and local celebrities and to bring them to life via technology. (JMV)