Student journals are recommended as a technique for encouraging college students to take a deep approach to learning. Literature on their use is reviewed, and considerations in their classroom use are discussed, including the physical form of the journal, grading, error correction, comments, style, privacy, when to use journals, when to read them,…

The new medium of computer-aided design requires changes to the creative problem-solving methodologies typically employed in the development of new visual designs. Most theoretical models of creative problem-solving suggest a linear progression from preparation and incubation to some type of evaluative study of the "inspiration." These…

To examine the skills and knowledge children use when they develop and tell stories, this study sought to provide an experiential demonstration of how schemata guides comprehension. Subjects were preschool, third-, and fifth-grade children described by their teachers as having average reading comprehension. Each child met with a researcher in an…

A study was designed to investigate the complex interrelationship of factors that affect university students' academic achievement. The study used a sample population of 72 students who were enrolled in first year Nursing and Teacher Education courses in 1991 at the Flinders University of South Australia. From data gathered over 2 years, a…

A study in two countries investigated college students' conceptions of "academic literacy," defined as the system of information exchange or mastery of the elements of such a system. Subjects were nine students, four at Ohio State University, a long-established "mega-university," and five at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, a small, newly-established…

This report explores the use of videos to facilitate learning in a mathematics course for teachers developed by England's Open University. Specific video extracts are discussed from a psycho-analytic perspective on learning. The report first examines the course content and briefly discusses the use of video as a teaching tool. Then the…

This paper summarizes our present knowledge and understanding of the processes and outcomes of learning. The basic idea about learning is that the outcomes of learning (e.g., propositional knowledge, procedural skills, and mental models) reflect differences in learning processes (e.g., encoding skills, attention allocation, and hypothesis…

One hundred seventy-one middle school students participated in a study to assess cognitive activity during television viewing. Students completed a questionnaire about their favorite programs, viewing habits, and social reality beliefs, then viewed a 17-minute professionally edited episode of a family drama and answered a multiple choice…

Generalizations arising from effective teaching studies are vulnerable because they are not based on a theoretical perspective of how learning occurs or can be improved, but have resulted from observations of what teachers appear to be doing when students are learning. Critics of teacher effectiveness studies contend that good instruction requires…

Proceedings of a conference on educational assessment are presented. A speech accompanying presentations of the 1987 Educational Testing Service Award for Distinguished Service to Measurement and a list of winners of that annual award from 1970 to 1987 are included. The nine papers provided include: (1) "How Assessment Can Best Serve Teaching and…

Ongoing work toward developing a learning environment that will perform real-time diagnoses of students' difficulties in solving mathematical word problems is described. The learning environment designed consists of a microworld and expert modules. The microworld (or toolbox) is a collection of mouse-driven interfaces that facilitate a transition…

A study investigated how text features influence the amount of vocabulary knowledge students acquired incidentally while reading expositions. Three sets of text features were identified from studies on comprehension: (1) features associated with the macrostructure, (2) features associated with logical and temporal relations in the microstructure,…

The details of a 6-year investigation entitled the Education Testing Service (ETS) Collaborative Research Project on Reading, which brought researchers and educators together in classroom studies of young children learning to read, are presented in this book. The first four chapters of the book describe the theoretical rationale, design, and…

Fifty-four high aptitude undergraduates and 46 moderate-to-low aptitude undergraduates were divided into four treatment groups and were given a pretest during which they learned and recalled a map of a small town in five successive trials. Two weeks later, each group was given a different treatment with a varying degree of explicitness of…

Drawing upon data from a series of studies, this paper analyzes children's verbalizations about a wordless picture book to discover any relationships between a child's learning style and his or her comprehension of events in the book. Using the definitions of learning style established by M. Rosenberg, the paper also compares the behavior of…