Cognitive process instruction takes a constructivist view of education and emphasizes that students must be actively involved in learning, not merely recipients of information. Four basic descriptive model-building frameworks characterize the work related to cognitive process instruction: (1) a developmental framework, (2) a microanalytic framework, (3) a diagnostic framework, and (4) an instructional or prescriptive framework. Models within a developmental framework provide developmental scales along one or more intellectual dimensions that can be used to map students. Those within the microanalytic framework provide ways of modeling cognitive structure by specifying the manner in which knowledge is organized, the causal mechanism responsible for processing that knowledge, and the mechanism by which the structure evolves in time. Models within the diagnostic framework provide descriptors that are used to diagnose the behavior of a particular subject in a given situation. Models within the instructional framework use different metaphors of the educational situation to justify differing practices. In the kind of science teaching that cognitive process instruction researchers advocate, reading plays a subordinate role, as one source of information among many. (JL)