The effects of cognitive strategy instruction on Chinese reading comprehension among Hong Kong low achieving students

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive strategy instruction (CSI) on Chinese reading comprehension of Hong Kong low achieving students. A total of 88 Grade 7 students from four intact Chinese language remedial groups were randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions. Students in the treatment group received a 6-week Chinese CSI Program in their regular Chinese language lessons. The findings in this study generally supported that the Program had a positive impact on the reading development of low achieving students. Students who received strategy instruction made superior gains in comprehension performance, used more strategies during their reading process, had more knowledge about, strategy use, and showed a more positive attitude toward the reading instruction than did their peers who received traditional Chinese language instruction. Students’ improvements on their strategy use and reading comprehension were maintained 4 months after the termination of the Program. However, the positive treatment effects of the Program were not transferred to other school subject materials, and students’ reading motivation did not have significant changes after the Program. Factors contributing to the success of the Program as well as its limitations are discussed.     

Working Memory, Motivation, and Teacher-Initiated Learning

Working memory is where we “think” as we learn. A notion that emerges as a synthesis from several threads in the research literatures of cognition, motivation, and connectionism is that motivation in learning is the process whereby working memory resource allocation is instigated and sustained. This paper reviews much literature on motivation and working memory, and concludes that the apparent novelty of the proposal offered to describe motivation in terms of working memory results from the apparent lack of cross-channel exchange among these research traditions. The relation between working memory and motivation is explored in the context of the interactive compensatory model of learning (ICML) in which learning is considered to result from the interaction of ability, motivation, and prior learning. The ICML is recast in light of the revised definition of motivation offered here. This paper goes on to suggest ways in which a range of teaching and learning issues and activities may be reconceptualized in the context of a model emphasizing a learner's working memory that makes use of chunks of previously acquired knowledge.     

Book reviews

David Evanier is a novelist and critic. He has written for The New York Times Book Review, Commentary, theParis Review, The American Spectator, National Review, and other journals.     

Research mentor: a tool to aid in the training of scientific investigators

We describe an intelligent mentor for teaching the ability to think scientifically. The student is given an arbitrary starting place in the matrix of knowledge surrounding an area of biomedical research. He/she then proposes hypotheses and supporting experiments which are checked against the knowledge base for agreement, consistency or contradiction. Agreement or consistency results in the report of successful experiments, thus advancing the student's "state-of-the-art." Contradiction results in failure of the experiment to support the hypothesis. In either case, a new hypothesis can then be proposed and tested, each step being potentially contingent on results of the last.
The knowledge base upon which the system operates is a frame-based implementation of the Biomatrix, augmented with pointers to literature citations. Each object (hypotheses, experiments, cells, animals, etc.) is described in terms of its properties and its relations to other objects. Thus, the matrix is represented as a semantic network. Other objects create the relations among the hypotheses, subhypotheses, experiments and other parts of the knowledge base.
This system provides experiential learning at a rate determined by the student, while saving costly resources.     

Professionalising Ph.D. education to enhance the quality of the student experience

Ph.D. student numbers have been increasing in Australia as has government interest in the economic and social outcomes of graduate education (Moses 1994, Cullen et al. 1994). Yet the position of Ph.D. students can still be seen as marginal within universities and the institutional organisation of Ph.D. education as problematic. This situation can be related to the highly individualistic nature of research and supervision which is both a barrier to and part of the argument against efforts to examine and discuss in general the processes of research training and supervisory interactions across disciplinary and departmental boundaries. This article positions all Ph.D. students, in all fields of study, as learners in a form of professional education -a perspective which offers a way out of this apparent dilemma. Drawing on data from a study reported in Cullen et al. (1994) the following topics are explored: Ph.D. students as learners of the knowledge and skill of the professional practice of research and scholarship; the role of the supervisor in assisting students to become independent practitioners; and the complementary professional role of student participation in the academic community. Implications for policy and practice to professionalise Ph.D. education and enhance the quality of the student experience are discussed.