All learning takes place through the unification of body and mind. Within the realm of motor skill learning, the term mental practice has been used to explain this phenomenon. It has been found that individuals can use their imaginations to learn and to improve upon their performance. Mental practice can be used by teachers who have too little…

An advanced learning center for gifted students from the third through the eighth grade is described. The goal of this program is to provide children who have leadership potential with a curricular environment that allows opportunities to probe, experiment, hypothesize, synthesize, and analyze in order to act and interact with others. This same…

Some children lack the framework of prior experience necessary for the comprehension and enjoyment of fanciful literature. Fanciful literature, though grounded in reality, deals not only with what is, but also with what could be or might have been. Since readers actively construct meaning by relating what they read to their conceptual systems,…

This pamphlet is the eighth in a series of ten stemming from the view that language is central to learning, that teachers can gain insights into their work and into learning by examining the language of the classroom, and that current language theory can be the means to such insights. The pamphlet contains a discussion of the uses of language in…

Designed to stimulate reluctant writers in grades five through eight, these 40 uncompleted stories were written by a teacher who has used them with success in the classroom. The stories are arranged by length and complexity, and topics range from tales of childhood experiences to accounts of history, nature, and science fiction. A section…

The purposes of this study were to describe the use of creative dramatics within an average ninth grade arts class and to document the behavior changes in verbal and nonverbal communications, creative thinking and behavior, feeling of group closeness, self-confidence, and attitude toward the course. A teacher inexperienced in drama conducted the…

Since imaginary awareness--as the core of the oral interpreter's art--must be preceded by both an awareness of internal events and an awareness of external events, awareness training can be the most effective means of helping interpreters develop their art. Two models of the awareness development process, a hierarchy of response levels and a…

This paper argues that a major aspect of intelligence is the ability to solve problems and that careful analysis of problem-solving behavior is a means of specifying many of the psychological processes that make up intelligence. The focus is on the mechanisms involved when, in the absence of complete instruction, a person must "invent" a new…

This collection of 52 articles reprinted from the "Horn Book Magazine" (1949-66) is intended to stimulate discussion on all aspects of children's reading and children's books. The articles are collected under seven headings: "Inspiration--How It Comes;""Goals and Guidelines for Writers and Illustrators;""Re-creating Other Times;""The Matter of…

Designed to provide a scale for assessing the quality of personal or imaginative writing, the Evaluation Scale for Personal Writing (ESPW) consists of a group of twenty-eight imaginative essays written by British fifteen year olds. These essays have been arranged in order of quality by an eight member sub-committee of the London Association for…

One of a series of works aimed at presenting contemporary critical opinion on major authors, this collection includes essays by Marie Borroff, Wallace Stevens, Joseph N. Riddle, Hi Simons, Sister M. Bernetta Quinn, C. Roland Wagner, Harold Bloom, Ralph J. Mills, Jr., Roy Harvey Pearce, Louis L. Martz, Morton Dauwen Zabel, and Northrop Frye--all…

These essays and documents, on and by Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and William Wells Brown focus on the oppression which they experienced and on violence and rebellion as it appears in the literature which they created. The chapters discuss Frederick Douglass and violence, rage in the fiction of Martin Delany, and the fiction of William…

A scoring manual for the Directed Imagination Test, a projective technique wherein the subject is instructed to write four fictional stories (four minutes are allowed for each) about teachers and their experiences, is presented. The manual provides detailed instructions for rating each story by fifteen dimensions relevant to teacher education…

This study includes exercises which assessed five rudimentary skills involved in understanding and interpreting imaginative literature. The study is one of a series by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which gathers information about the eudcational attainments of 9, 13, and 17 year olds and adults (ages 26-35) in ten subject areas.…

This curriculum guide in language arts for kindergarten through twelfth grade emphasizes a flexible student-centered curriculum concentrating on developing a student's ability to find out information for himself in an atmosphere of responsible freedom. To facilitate this approach to learning, the guide is not organized into traditional subject…