CUE SYSTEM UTILIZATIONS AMONG OLDER READERS

The effects of writing style upon mature older readers’ reading comprehension are considered. Two narrative historical selections, the first emotive and abstract and the second nonemotive and concrete, were employed. Miscue analysis was used to evaluate the efficiency with which each reader used reading strategies across the five systems that cue meaningful comprehension. Miscues were analyzed at the word, clause, sentence, and intersentence levels. In addition, interview schedules were employed to identify readers’ perceptions of preferred reading strategies and to permit a comparison with actual performance. The findings indicate that mature older readers are consistent in cue system utilization. A preference for the word cue system influenced both the use of cues from other systems and comprehension. Use of the word‐level cue system is inversely related to the use of the other available cue systems. Preference for cues within words also appears to be inversely related to comprehending effectiveness. The subjects’ perceptions of the reading process and their actual reading performance appeared to determine patterns of cue system use more clearly than did the differences in materials. As a result, those developing materials intended for use in programs with older persons should not only be concerned with the content and quality of those materials but also the skills and perceptions of those who will use the materials.     

SPREAD: A Distributed Simulation Toolkit

This article describes “SPREAD”, a simulation toolkit, and its use in building “Virtual Robots”, a simulation of multiple mobile robot vehicles used in the teaching of computer science at university level. A novel aspect of the simulator is the use of PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) to achieve high performance at low cost by using spare CPU cycles on large numbers of networked workstations.     

Renovation of Teacher Training by the New Media

For the past fifteen years, new techniques and methods, most particularly audio-visual ones, have made it possible to foresee a profound renewal in the training and retraining of teachers. To name some, the use of tape recorders, and then closed-circuit television, the production of anthologies on films, radio and television programmes, which make up an integral part of a system of training at a distance. In industrialised countries, these methods are very unequally used; in some of them, they do not even have as yet a system of retraining at a distance. Also conditions vary greatly according to the training institutes. Some only use the most traditional methods more or less perfected; others, well equipped with projectors of all sorts, laboratories and closed-circuit television, try to introduce really new methods and mediafor teaching. And lastly, some new procedures have hardly gone outside the research centres.