Learning with summaries: Effects of representation mode and type of learning activity on comprehension and transfer

The purpose of the experiment was to examine whether students better understand a science text when they are asked to self-generate summaries or to study predefined summaries. Furthermore, we tested the effects of verbal and pictorial summaries. The experiment followed a 2 × 2 design with representation mode (verbal vs. pictorial) and learning activity (self-generating vs. studying) as experimental factors. The main dependent variables were learning performance, measured by a comprehension and a transfer test, and strategy use, measured by self-report scales. Seventy-one students (Grade 10) participated in the study. The results showed that studying predefined summaries in a pictorial representation mode facilitated deep understanding. Furthermore, mediation analysis showed that the effect of representational mode was mediated by students' spatial representations of learning content. The effect of spatial representations was in turn facilitated by mental imagery activities.     

Mnemonics for the Middle Grades

Mnemonics represent a diverse group of research-based instructional methods with wide application for middle school teachers and students. Teachers can model how to use mnemonics and infuse them in their instruction. Students can use mnemonics as a study skills memory prompt in any class. Due to their potential as a highly effective instructional and learning tool, this article provides information about mnemonics with instructional tips and examples for middle level teachers.     

The Twelve Cranial Nerves of Christmas: Mnemonics,Rhyme, and Anatomy – Seeing the Lighter Side

Anatomy, has in history, been linked to helpful ways to remember structures, branches of nerves, structures passing through foramina, etc. Scalp is even a mnemonic in itself (S kin, C onnective tissue, A poneurosis, L oose areolar tissue, P ericranium). There has been concern by some educators that using mnemonics or rhymes promotes a surface approach to learning and is unhelpful in establishing long-term and meaningful deep learning. This article argues that mnemonics and rhyme can be used, in the appropriate way, at the right time, by students as an important learning strategy. That strategy can help lay a foundation of knowledge to be developed and later built upon, or simply recall information more easily. Mnemonics, like all information that is to be recalled, is consolidated by rehearsal. In examining the neuroanatomy of learning theories, it is therefore possible to suggest that when students begin to learn an area of anatomy, such as the cranial nerves, using a mnemonic or rhyme, it can help students remember the names and facilitate the engagement of the working memory processes assisting the student to build a construct for subsequent deeper layers of knowledge. Modern approaches to anatomy education involve a myriad of learning opportunities, but educators must assess the value of each one before recommending them to students. It appears that using mnemonics and rhyme is as valid today as it has been for centuries.     

英语教学书面表达有效反馈初探

书面表达反馈是书面表达教学中的一个重要组成部分。书面表达中的反馈形式有学生间的互批反馈,教师的抽样批改、面批、针对某一点的总结反馈等。反馈的渠道有教师对学生、学生与学生、学生自我修正等。有效反馈要注意适时、得体,反馈要有启发性、针对性。教师对各种反馈形式的效果要进行评价、总结,使之真实有用,促进英语书面表达教学。     

THE MINNESOTA TEACHER ATTITUDE INVENTORY

This paper reports on the results of a postal survey carried out basically to examine the nature and extent of usage of mnemonic techniques employed by Psychology students in preparing for finals examinations. Two hundred and five post‐graduates of the Psychology Department at University College, Swansea, i.e. all students who had sat finals papers in Psychology between 1967 and 1971, were sent a questionnaire. The results, based on a response rate of 74 per cent, indicate that 53 per cent of students used mnemonics in examination preparation in order to retain points to be made in essays, 37 per cent repeatedly read material to be retained, 4 per cent claimed they made no attempt to memorize material as such, but rather arrived at an intrinsic understanding of the material. In terms of examination performance there are no significant differences between users and non‐users of mnemonics. This finding does not, therefore, support the view that the use of mnemonics is beneficial to examination performance.     

The effects of visual and verbal coding mnemonics on learning Chinese characters in computer-based instruction

The effects of different approaches to learning Chinese characters were investigated. Ninety-two high-school students were randomly assigned to one of five treatment groups: translation, verbal mnemonics, visual mnemonics, dual coding mnemonics, or self-generated mnemonics. All groups received instruction and completed posttests in a computer-based environment. The results indicate that participants who generated their own mnemonics demonstrated higher posttest performance than those in visual coding, verbal coding, and translation groups; subjects in the dual coding group scored higher than those in the translation group. Those who generated their own mnemonics spent more time on task than any other group, and those in the verbal coding group took more time than those in the translation group. Survey and qualitative data suggest that learners' interpretations of the Chinese characters were rooted in their cultural backgrounds and personal experiences.     

Teachers’ monitoring of students’ text comprehension: can students’ keywords and summaries improve teachers’ judgment accuracy?

We investigated intra-individual monitoring and regulation in learning from text in sixth-grade students and their teachers. In Experiment 1, students provided judgments of learning (JOLs) for six texts in one of three cue-prompt conditions (after writing delayed keywords or summaries or without a cue prompt) and then selected texts for restudy. Teachers also judged their students’ learning for each text, while seeing - if present - the keywords or summaries each student had written for each text, and also selected texts for restudy. Overall, monitoring accuracy was low (.10 for students, ?.02 for teachers) and did not differ between cue-prompt conditions. Regulation, indexed by the correlation between JOLs and restudy selections, was significant (?.38 for students, ?.60 for teachers), but was also not affected by cue-prompt condition. In Experiment 2, teachers judged students’ comprehension of six texts without knowing the students’ names, so that only the keywords and summaries, not prior impressions, could inform judgments. Again, monitoring accuracy was generally low (.06), but higher for keywords (.23) than for summaries (?.10). These results suggest that monitoring intra-individual differences in students’ learning is challenging for teachers. Analyses of the diagnosticity and utilization of keywords suggest that these may contain insufficient cues for improving teacher judgments at this level of specificity.     

Academics’ virtual identities

The focus of this article is on the experiences of staff members involved in a student support programme. The experiential, social, and student-centred approaches incorporated in this programme provided not only students, but also academics with pathways to lifelong learning. Functioning in a community of practice (CoP) (with students and also with like-minded colleagues) created an enabling environment for the development of effective teaching and learning approaches, as well as practical skills. Additional positive results relate to the fact that academics are aware of the importance of and more equipped with the competence to scaffold students towards becoming more effective in the learning process.     

Examining the influence of expertise on the effectiveness of diagramming and summarising when studying scientific materials

A 2 (learning strategies: diagram vs. summary) × 2 (levels of expertise: low vs. high) experiment was conducted to compare the effectiveness of using diagrams to writing summaries for students given biological information to learn and who possessed different levels of expertise in that topic area. A main effect of learning strategy used on number of idea units encoded (in diagrams or summaries) was found: drawing diagrams was superior to writing summaries. However, no interaction effect between learning strategies and expertise was found. An examination of students’ subjective ratings of cognitive load revealed that those with low expertise reported higher levels of cognitive load when constructing diagrams. These findings suggest that using diagrams is effective for identifying and encoding important information when learning, but that it would be helpful to provide guidance about diagram use particularly to students who are novices in the topic area to reduce cognitive load.     

Visualization as a guide for composing

Visualization techniques involving the analysis of pictorial information (e.g., photographs, paintings, and geometric forms) are used to guide students' understanding of the composing process. For the first exploratory study sets of papers written by students enrolled in an introductory level composition course incorporating these techniques were compared with sets of papers written by students in another section of the same course to determine the effectiveness of visualization for understanding the process of revision. Students in a second study completed a questionnaire designed to assess students' memory for visualization techniques as well as their tendency to apply these techniques to new situations. The results suggest that visualization techniques were effective in guiding the revision process (Study 1). Further, results show that students remembered both specific details about the pictorial information used to guide the composing process (outlining, analyzing, revising) and the underlying principles informing these techniques (Study 2). Visualization techniques are discussed in terms of their potential usefulness in reducing the cognitive demands implicit in the composing process.     

CONVERTING TEST DATA TO COUNSELING INFORMATION: SYSTEM TRIAL-WITH FEEDBACK1

A computer-based system for converting test data into locally-validated counseling information was developed and field tested with potential vocational school students. Two data-information conversion procedures were used: similarity (centour) scores based on discriminant analyses and success estimates based on experience tables. Longitudinal validation analyses involving over 1500 students and 20 interest and aptitude measures provided the empirical base for the data-information conversion procedures. Similarity scores and success estimates were developed for each of the 12 vocational program areas in which the students enrolled. These reporting procedures were field tested with 1000 students enrolled in 12 high schools, Illustrations of the similarity score reporting procedures are provided along with summaries of student reactions to these procedures.     

Mnemonics for phonics

Two experiments were run in which the effect of pictures as mnemonics for learning letter-sound pairs was investigated with prereading children. In both experiments the mnemonics had a substantial positive effect during training, but this effect disappeared on a transfer test with the mnemonics removed.     

Understanding pictorial information in biology: students’ cognitive activities and visual reading strategies

ABSTRACT

In classroom, scientific contents are increasingly communicated through visual forms of representations. Students’ learning outcomes rely on their ability to read and understand pictorial information. Understanding pictorial information in biology requires cognitive effort and can be challenging to students. Yet evidence-based knowledge about students’ visual reading strategies during the process of understanding pictorial information is pending. Therefore, 42 students at the age of 14–15 were asked to think aloud while trying to understand visual representations of the blood circulatory system and the patellar reflex. A category system was developed differentiating 16 categories of cognitive activities. A Principal Component Analysis revealed two underlying patterns of activities that can be interpreted as visual reading strategies: 1. Inferences predominated by using a problem-solving schema; 2. Inferences predominated by recall of prior content knowledge. Each pattern consists of a specific set of cognitive activities that reflect selection, organisation and integration of pictorial information as well as different levels of expertise. The results give detailed insights into cognitive activities of students who were required to understand the pictorial information of complex organ systems. They provide an evidence-based foundation to derive instructional aids that can promote students pictorial-information-based learning on different levels of expertise.     

Effects of knowledge of semantic roles on summarizing written prose

College students wrote summaries of eight short passages as a test of their ability to identify important information. After pairing naive summaries according to length and original passage, those summaries which judges identified as “better” were found to contain significantly more of the major semantic roles, such as Agent and Instrument, than did summaries judged “not as good.” It was also found that students wrote significantly better summaries when instructed to base the summaries on the major semantic roles within the passage. These summaries were significantly better than summaries based upon the traditional paragraph analysis of “topics” and “main ideas,” and they were significantly better than summaries written without any special instructions.     

高校学生党支部干部配备的实践与研究

对高校学生党支部干部配备进行研究，阐述了学生党支部干部配备必须明确范围和工作目标；对照条件，遵守规定；从实际出发，把原则性与灵活性结合起来；抓好调查摸底，全面掌握党员的表现和综合素质；抓好“一个重点”，配强、配好支部书记；抓好培训环节，提高整体素质及工作能力和水平，增强凝聚力和战斗力。     

美国对电子商务征税的理论和实践

电子商务的出现使得传统的贸易形式发生了巨大改变。在给政府带来新的经济增长点的同时,也给政府带来了亟待解决的新问题,即传统的税收制度要怎样适应电子商务的发展。美国是当前世界第一经济体,既是电子商务产生最早、应用最广、发展最快的国家,也是公认的在税制方面最先进的国家之一。美国政府出于经济与贸易因素考虑,从上个世纪末起开始实施《互联网免税法案》。但这一法案越来越受到学术界及地方政府的反对,废除《互联网免税法案》的呼声更是越来越强烈,各州政府在实践中就电子商务征税进行了一些新的尝试。电子商务终将从现在的保护伞中脱出,和其他实体经济一起面对公平的市场竞争环境,因此电子商务税制的最终发展方向是,由政治性的免税区迈向公平竞争、正常纳税的市场主体。     

Examination of Middle-School Students' Independent Use of a Complex Mnemonic System

The purpose of the present 2-experiment study was to determine whether a recently developed mnemonic numeric strategy could be used more independently by middle school students. In the context of associating various 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century inventions with their dates, the authors found that students could successfully implement the strategy in a group-instructional context (as opposed to the one-on-one individual administrations of earlier investigations). The students were not, however, able to take the basic components of the strategy and effectively apply them without complete mnemonic pictorial support. That is, students did not create their own memory-enhancing visual images in the absence of instructor-provided interactive line drawings. The results are consistent with those of previous research documenting that less sophisticated learners (including middle school students) are unable to apply complex mnemonic strategies independently unless they are provided with sufficient auxiliary support to reduce information-processing demands.     

Teaching Science Through Pictorial Models During Read-Alouds

This study examines how three elementary teachers refer to pictorial models (photographs, drawings, and cartoons) during science read-alouds. While one teacher used realistic photographs for the purpose of visually verifying facts about crystals, another employed analytical diagrams as heuristic tools to help students visualize complex target systems (rainbow formation and human eye functioning). Another teacher used fictional cartoons to engage students in analogical storytelling, communicating animal camouflage as analogous to human “blending in.” However, teachers did not always explicitly convey the representational nature of pictorial models (analog and target as separate entities). It is argued that teachers need to become more aware of how they refer to pictorial models in children’s science books and how to promote student visual literacy.     

课堂环境下构词法与记忆术词汇习得效果比较研究——基于陕西省高中学生英语词汇习得状况的研究

通过问卷调查等方法分析了高中英语教师及学生对构词法和记忆术两种词汇习得模式的使用趋向及学生在课堂环境下使用两种方法不同的后续效果,探讨了这两种词汇习得模式对词汇习得效果的影响,并分析造成该结果的原因。     

Cross-Cultural Applications of Yodai Mnemonics in Education

Virtually all research on mnemonics has been published in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. A Japanese educator, Masachika Nakane, developed mnemonics for teaching mathematics, science, spelling, grammar, and English. Whereas most mnemonics help one remember specific facts, Nakane's mnemonics (called Yodai, meaning "the essence of structure") help one remember principles, rules, and procedures. Some Yodai mnemonics have been adapted for teaching mathematical operations with fractions in the United States. This paper describes the mnemonics and reviews research on their effectiveness in instruction. Research questions on the nature of Yodai and on adapting Yodai in Western cultures are suggested.