Four 8th graders with learning disabilities were taught to recruit assistance from peers during cooperative learning activities in two general classrooms. Training consisted of modeling, role playing, corrective feedback, and praise. Recruitment training increased the productivity and accuracy with which the students completed their language arts…

More than sixty years ago, John Dewey and Louise Rosenblatt produced theoretical work that challenged prevailing assumptions concerning art and aesthetic experience. Today, their work continues to be relevant and particularly useful for exploring the troubled interface between literary scholarship and classroom practice. Rereading Dewey and…

A study examined students' achievement increases to determine whether improvement resulted from spending a longer amount of time on language arts. Subjects of the study were 149 freshmen who attended Northeast Dubois Middle and High Schools in Indiana. During the eighth grade, 77 of those students had one 45-minute language arts period in 1992 and…

This booklet outlines the California state guidelines for writing which assert that students should be carefully taught to read and compose many types of discourse to prepare them for higher education, the job market, and citizenship in democracy. The booklet summarizes the purposes for which the California Assessment Program (CAP) was developed,…

Many students in the United States do not possess a sound geographic vocabulary. This study compared two instructional methods, drill and varied activities, that might be used to develop that vocabulary. Eighth-grade social studies classes at three sites (one urban, one rural, and one transitional) were used to assess learning of the 50 United…

The central objective of this study was to determine the effects of formal training in the use and types of questions and in the nature and use of algorithms on middle school students' achievement in economic geography. Subjects were 190 eighth grade students in a large metropolitan school district. Three experimental groups received either: (1)…

This study investigated the effects of three instructional strategies and student entry characteristics on student engagement and the acquisition of skills necessary for the construction and interpretation of line graphs. The strategies examined were an activity-based approach, a written simulation-based approach, and a combination of activity-…

An instructional model based on a learning cycle including correlation, analysis, and generalization (CAG) was developed and applied to design an instructional module for grade 8 students in Taiwan, Republic of China. The CAG model was based on Piagetian theory and a concept model (Pella, 1975). The module developed for heat and temperature was…

In 1974, the College Board in Puerto Rico initiated a program on educational counseling for high school-bound students. The program was designed to help students define their educational goals and career interests before entering the ninth grade where they would be required to make specific curriculum choices. The program calls for the…

A prominent theme permeating national science education reform reports such as the "National Science Education Standards" (National Research Council [NRC], 1996) and "Project 2061: Science for All Americans" (Rutherford & Alhgren, 1990) recommends the incorporation of cooperative learning in the science classroom. Although…

Reporting on part of the data collected in the Junior High Classroom Organization Study, this document focuses on the mathematics subsample. Twenty-six mathematics teachers in 11 junior high schools were observed in two classes. The major purpose of this paper is to describe the classroom procedures and behaviors of teachers identified as…

A COMPARISON IS MADE BETWEEN THE TEACHING MACHINE AND HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL TEXT FORMATS. A TEACHING MACHINE PRESENTS AN ORDERED SEQUENCE OF INSTRUCTION TO THE LEARNER, ONE FRAME AT A TIME. AFTER RESPONDING TO A STIMULUS FRAME, THE LEARNER'S ANSWER IS IMMEDIATELY CONFIRMED OR CORRECTED. THE LEARNER PROCEEDS TO THE NEXT FRAME AND IS PREVENTED…

This unit for the eighth grade is intended to develop, through an inductive approach, the students' understanding of the reasons for the irregularities and difficulties of English spelling. Exercises and lectures on historical background are provided to help students realize that our spelling system is based on late Middle English spelling, that…

To explore methods of visual communication as a supplement to bilingual education, 200 white male subjects were selected from a public school system in South Florida (100 from the first grade and 100 from the eighth grade) and were allowed to create visual statements from a standardized set of photos. Using primarily Latent Partition Analysis, the…

Seventy-two grade 8 students were randomly assigned to one of four experimental groups. One group studied five programed lessons in structural grammar, written without use of symbols or diagrams. A second group studied the same content presented with a symbolic notation to represent the grammar concepts. A third group studied the same content…