“The story means more to me now”: teaching thinking through Guided Reading

This article describes perspective and imagery thinking strategies taught during Guided Reading lessons. These strategies are designed to enhance comprehension by giving students techniques for manipulating meaning. Social and physical perspective thinking strategies allow students to identify and apply a variety of perspectives, while imagery thinking strategies allow students to re‐view meaning through the application of still, moving and melting images. Comment from teachers and students involved in a project designed to trial these strategies indicate they may be one way of raising standards in English.     

“GAME” VERSUS “TEST” INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE WISC1

“Game” or “test” instructions on either verbal or nonverbal WISC scales were given to 160 third- and sixth-grade children. Ss in one condition were told they were going to take several tests, while Ss in the other condition were told they were going to play several games. Significant differences in performance due to task definition were found only on verbal tasks at the sixth-grade level with test instructions yielding superior performance. Results at the third-grade level failed to replicate previous results which suggested game instructions produce superior performance on nonverbal tasks.