Fourth- and fifth-grade students' motivation and engagement during classroom discussions were investigated in 2 studies. Study 1 examined students' moment-by-moment engagement during collaborative peer-managed small-group discussions in comparison to conventional teacher-managed whole-class discussions. Study 2 evaluated the long term effects of…

This study examined the influence of teachers' instructional moves on students' relational thinking during small-group collaborative discussions. One hundred and twenty 4th grade students and 6 teachers participated in a series of 10 discussions, generating a video-recorded corpus containing 32,511 turns for speaking. A microanalysis of a subset…

Developmental stages in reading English words were examined among 118 Chinese children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 from a working-class elementary school in Tianjin, China. Proficiency in Chinese and English, ability to make orthographic analogies in both languages, and strategies in reading English words were assessed. Results suggest that Chinese…

The most important result of this study was simply the illustration that the systematic analysis and experimental study of the learning of principles from text is possible. (Author)

Data indicate that performance is better when feedback is provided after, rather than before, the response. (MB)

The subjects who received knowledge of correct response (KCR) immediately after responding to a programed instruction unit learned significantly more than those who received no KCR or those who could peek at the correct response before they answered. (AG)

The hypothesis that thematic prompts facilitate learning by furnishing mediators was investigated in three experiments, two of which produced enhanced learning. (CK)

In two experiments, subjects were instructed to take a distinctive point of view while reading and recalling a story. The results were interpreted to mean that the schema brought into play by the perspective instructions selectively enhances encoding when operative during reading, and selectively enhances retrieval when operative during attempts…

Two experiments involving Chinese 2nd graders and 4th graders investigated the use of subcharacter information to learn to pronounce unfamiliar semantic-phonetic compound characters. Experiment 1 confirmed that children can use the information in both tone-different and onset-different characters to learn character pronunciations and showed that…

The results show that the delay-retention effect occurs under conditions approximating those of real instruction and confirm the interference-perseveration interpretation of the phenomenon. (Author)

In two experiments, undergraduates who completed the last words of sentences they read learned more than subjects who simply read whole sentences. This facilitation was observed even with a list of sentences that were almost always completed with the wrong words. (Author/GDC)

College undergraduates read stories from one of two directed perspectives or no directed perspective. An idea's significance in terms of the assigned perspective affected both initial learning and recall one week later. Schemata, or conceptual frameworks, were assumed to aid in memory and retrieval. (Author/GDC)

The present experiment compared noun-pair learning, with and without sentence elaboration, on pairs representing all combinations of high and low frequency of usage on the stimulus and response side. (Author)

Evidence from the present study indicates that the delay-retention effect is due primarily to the forgetting of interference-producing errors during the delay interval and, secondarily, to the increased time a subject spends studying the feedback after a delay. (Authors)