Recalling structured text: Does what goes in determine what comes out?

Eighty-eight 12–13 year old children studied a short passage for five minutes which was printed in either a'chunked'or a'traditional'format. The children were then asked to write out the passage from memory. It was found that'chunking'did not significantly affect recall. However, the format of the presentation affected the format of the recall. Forty-four out of 44 children in the chunked condition recalled their text in a chunked format, and virtually all of the 44 children with the traditional text wrote out their passages in the traditional way.     

Disciplinary literacy and multimodal text design in physical education

This article argues that scholarship on literacy in and across the disciplines has disproportionately focused on the core subjects of English, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies rather than on “specialist” subjects such as Physical Education. This disparity in emphasis has provided little guidance to specialist teachers seeking to understand and address the literacy demands of subject areas that often privilege an expanded conception of literacy. To illustrate the affordances of such analysis for PE teachers as well as their literacy colleagues, the reading demands of a particular multimodal text from PE—a three‐part basketball play—are presented in light of key themes from the US Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy. Complexities related to collective, embodied, and sequential meaning construction are explored. Recommendations for instruction and professional collaboration are shared.     

基于Authorware的《PS文字特效处理》课件设计

文章主要是利用Authorware的面向对象的可视化编程的人机交互方式,丰富的媒体素材使用方法,强大的数据处理能力,高效的多媒体集成环境等功能设计了《PS文字特效处理》课件。文章针对《PS文字特效处理》教学内容的特点,介绍了利用 Authorware软件开发本课件时应注意的问题,以及对教育教学产生的优越性。     

Teaching a structured approach to the design process for undergraduate engineering students by problem-based education

The paper describes our 2-year experience with the new problem-based design project, which has recently been introduced in the engineering design seminars for second-year engineering students at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. This guided self-study project is a tool to make the students familiar with the design process by presenting them with a framework of clearly defined and timed out phases in the design process. The students have to solve a small engineering design problem in a team. They are guided by a manual and by a strict time schedule. A tutor watches over the students' progress. At the end of the design project, the team writes a design report and presents it orally. A team mark is given by the tutors, considering three criteria: the way the team has completed the phases of the design process, the quality of the design report, and the presentation. The mark is individualized on the basis of the student's contribution to the teamwork. The appreciation of students and tutors for this problem-based learning activity was positive.     

How instructional design experts use knowledge and experience to solve ill‐structured problems

This study examined how instructional design (ID) experts used their prior knowledge and previous experiences to solve an ill‐structured instructional design problem. Seven experienced designers used a think‐aloud procedure to articulate their problem‐solving processes while reading a case narrative. Results, presented in the form of four assertions, showed that experts (1) narrowed the problem space by identifying key design challenges, (2) used an amalgam of knowledge and experience to interpret the problem situation, (3) incorporated a mental model of the ID process in their problem analyses, and (4) came to similar conclusions about how to respond to the situation, despite differences in their initial conceptualizations. Implications for educating novice instructional designers are discussed.     

The educational design of textbooks: a text for being interdisciplinary

This paper provides insights into both the educational design of textbooks and interdisciplinary education. The author introduces two educational principles for textbook design – instructional alignment and balancing diversity and meaningful guidance for readers – and applies them to writing his own textbook chapter for being interdisciplinary. The two broad conclusions are: textbook design can be a new area of study in higher education, illuminated by curriculum design and reflective practice; and textbooks can provide a useful method of interdisciplinary education.     

Using LSA and text segmentation to improve automatic Chinese dialogue text summarization

Automatic Chinese text summarization for dialogue style is a relatively new research area. In this paper, Latent Semantic Analysis （LSA） is first used to extract semantic knowledge from a given document, all question paragraphs are identified, an automatic text segmentation approach analogous to Text＇filing is exploited to improve the precision of correlating question paragraphs and answer paragraphs, and finally some ＂important＂ sentences are extracted from the generic content and the question-answer pairs to generate a complete summary. Experimental results showed that our approach is highly efficient and improves significantly the coherence of the summary while not compromising informativeness.     

A generative theory of textbook design: Using annotated illustrations to foster meaningful learning of science text

In three experiments, college students read a text explaining how lightning works and then took problem-solving transfer tests. Some students (integrated group) also viewed illustrations depicting the major stages in the formation of lightning that (a) were placed adjacent to corresponding text paragraphs and (b) contained annotations repeating the verbal cause-and-effect information from the text. Other students (separated group) viewed the same illustrations (a) on a separate page and (b) without annotations, after they had finished reading the text. The integrated group generated approximately 50% more creative solutions on transfer problems than the separated group, and this pattern was stronger for students who lacked experience in meteorology than for high-experience students. The positive effects of integrated illustrations depended on incorporating annotations (i.e., captions and labels) into the illustrations rather than placing illustrations close to corresponding paragraphs. Results were interpreted in light of a generative theory of multimedia learning which posits that meaningful learning requires constructing connections between visual and verbal representations of a system.     

外语课堂多模态语篇设计及其功能理据探究简

现代技术交流环境改变了人们的认知模式,传统的外语课堂单模态语篇设计已经被不同符号模态编码设计所取代,其中系统功能理论对不同视觉、听觉和动觉／触觉模态编码的信息交换起着重要的理论支撑作用。以《高级英语》为例,探讨外语课堂多模态语篇设计,以及相关的系统功能理据。     

关于高中生物教科书图文整体设计的思考

图文配合是否得当是判断教科书质量高低不可或缺的标准之一。本文就高中生物学教科书在编写时文字系统与图像系统的整体设计提出了一些建议。在选取图像时,要发挥不同类型图像的优势并融入一些隐性的价值;在图像的组织方式上,要注意灵活多样,兼顾不同类型的图像组合使用;在工作方式上,美术编辑要提前介入,与文字编辑相互沟通。     

Inserted questions as aids to reading text

There has been a major shift in the psychology of language from a behavioristic to a cognitive view of learning. One important reason for this shift in thinking was that behavioristic theory simply could not account for language behavior as portrayed in Chomsky's theory of language. Within educational psychology, instructional research has assumed a more cognitive posture as well, particularly research involving the stimulation of prose processing through interspersing questions in text. Originally based on the associative or behavioristic model, early (1965–1970) adjunct question research can be characterized as having a variables orientation. Within this orientation, primary consideration was given to examining the effects of manipulating question position (before or after text segments) and question frequency on text comprehension. In this early research, inserted questions were invariably pitched at a rote or verbatim learning level. Since the onset (c. 1970) of the cognitive revolution, however, adjunct question research has been focussed on examining the effects of different cognitive levels of inserted questions on text comprehension, and on developing methods for assessing processes produced by adjunct questions. However, the degree to which cognitive levels as operationalyzed in the experiments reviewed here captures the richness of cognition as it occurs in the schools is, of course, open to question. Other areas of cognitively-oriented research include the assessment of the relationship between individual differences and adjunct question treatments, and the generation of questions by subjects while reading. This more recent thrust in adjunct question research can be termed a processes orientation. Research associated with both the variables orientation and the processes orientation are reviewed. Finally, some remarks are made concerning the paucity of theory in adjunct question research, the possible use of semantic memory theories as a basis for future research within the adjunct question paradigm, and the need for new question paradigms that more closely match question answering in general.Appreciation is extended to Michael Macdonald-Ross for his critical comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper.     

Teaching second-grade students to write sequential text

With the adoption of the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards, writing has become an increasingly important area of instruction. Moreover, there has been an increased sophistication in the types of writing required of young children and the use of textual evidence expected in student writing. Historically, children have not been routinely taught explicit strategies for writing, but have been exposed to less rigid writing instruction such as Writer's Workshop. The current study examined an explicit writing strategy, the Read-to-Write Strategy, to determine its effectiveness in teaching young children how to write sequential text. A single subject design (N = 40) was used to compare the writing of second graders before and after instruction. Results indicated that the Read-to-Write Strategy significantly increased the quality of sequential text from the pre- to post-instruction with a large effect size reported. Implications and recommendations for educators and researchers are provided.     

A modified refutation text design: effects on instructional efficiency for experts and novices

Recently, cognitive load theory has been considered within conceptual change research. Although the effectiveness of refutation texts (RT) has been proven, the conceptual change process involved and the influencing factors remain unclear. To contribute to this research, we investigate the efficiency of pupils working with a modified RT design in which the alternative and scientific conceptions are not explicitly contrasted, and we examine the level of learner expertise as a possible influencing factor. We investigated the efficiency based on the scientific conceptions learned and the mental effort invested (reflecting cognitive load) during instruction (N = 195, 9th graders). Only pupils with high prior knowledge (experts) showed low efficiency and higher mental effort when dealing with alternative conceptions. Our results indicate that the experts did not profit from the mental effort they invested in the learning process, whereas the novices seemed to profit from their invested mental effort.