The National Literacy Act of 1991 provided the funding to begin building an adult literacy staff development infrastructure by requiring all states to increase their staff development funding from 10% to 15%. Inquiry-based staff development was one of the most promising models to emerge from the staff development activities conducted in 1992-1993…

Wisconsin writer Marshal Cook's article, "Training Your Muse: Seven Steps to Creativity," (1986) provides a basis for creative activities which help students in a three-credit tutor training course understand both tutoring and the writing process. In the first activity student tutors are asked to bring in a picture that symbolizes a good…

Some specific aspects of the process of discovery are explored as they are experienced in the visual arts and the physical sciences. Both fields use the same visual/brain processing system, and both disciplines share an imaginative and productive interest in the disciplined use of imagistic thinking. Many productive interactions between visual…

Through the years, many researchers have advanced theories of problem solving. Probably the best definition of problem solving to apply to adult learning programs is Wallas' (1926) four-stage theory. The stages are (1) a preparation, (2) an incubation period, (3) a moment of illumination, and (4) final application or verification of the solution.…

Adapting strategies of invention from the new process-oriented rhetoric, the literature teacher can help students understand what they read through prereading exercises. Presenting students with an abstract model of a text's metaphoric structure, the teacher can spark students' immediate and imaginative response to the model, involving them…

In the situation described, the withholding of immediate reinforcement led a student to verify his method, and thus led to greater confidence and motivation. (SD)

This study investigated the emergence of combinatorial competence in early adolescence and the effectiveness of a programmed discovery training procedure. Significant increases in combinatorial skill with age were shown; it was found that the expression of this skill was significantly facilitated if problems involved concrete material of low…

This article describes the use of activity counseling with borderline dropout high school students. The activity counseling consisted of urban encounters followed by group sessions in which students exchanged stories, opinions and feelings. These students have demonstrated improvement in self-concept, credit earning, and productivity. (SJL)

This paper describes the use of LOGOWriter with fifth grade boys as a means of developing programming procedures for computer games that they could use to simulate motion with acceleration, as well as techniques for controlling the direction of motion. The kinds of programs developed, student responses to this work, observations about teaching…

Part of a collection of papers commissioned by Foundations, a project designed to identify career development needs of students entering the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), the paper examines implications of discovery and expository learning for hearing impaired students. Differences are considered between the discovery method,…

From the Series "Social Studies Education: The Elementary School -- Focus on Inquiry.

This study concerns a moment in the learning process which is considered crucial, namely, that point when the learner is confronted with the necessity of discovering from the models already learned and stored in memory elements that will be useful in constructing a new utterance or solving a new problem. The emphasis is on the point of connection…

This paper makes six assertions concerning the artist as experimenter and the means by which artists progress from experiment to experiment. (1) The family resemblances typically cited between the arts and the sciences are trivial, tend to be wish-fulfilling analyses of the common logic of art and science, and promise more than they can deliver.…