Shawn M. Glynn

Analogical Reasoning and Problem Solving in Science Textbooks

People’s frequent use of analogies to explain everyday phenomena underscores their potential value as instructional tools. Such expressions as “Let me give you an analogy ...,” “It’s just like ...,” “It’s the same as ...,” “It’s no different than ...,” “Think of it this way ...,” are commonplace in casual conversation.

Instructional Texts Rewritten by Five Expert Teams: Revisions and Retention Improvements.

700 undergraduates were tested in 3 experiments on original or rewritten versions of 52 instructional texts about Army job tasks, general science, philosophy, and history. 5 experts had rewritten various sets of the texts and stated hypotheses about the efficacious features of their revisions. We tested their hypotheses and several others. Recall and recognition tests were given immediately and after a 24-hr delay. Some of our hypotheses about the revision features were supported, but different features were effective for different sets of texts. It was concluded that some experts have effective knowledge about improving instructional text, but it exists primarily in procedural form

Use of Cognitive Capacity in Reading: Effects of Some Content Features of Text.

Use of cognitive capacity was measured during reading of text in six experiments. Content features of the texts were varied. A secondary task technique was used to measure use of capacity. In all experiments, capacity was filled more completely while reading narrative text than while reading expository text. The finding was generalized over two pools of passages, over two modalities of secondary task probes— auditory and tactile—and over two secondary tasks—simple reaction time and choice reaction time. Three hypotheses for the narrativity effect were investigated. Not supported were an hypothesis based on the interest value of the passages and the hypothesis that difficult to comprehend passages induced problem solving cognitive operations that filled capacity. The results were consistent with a comprehensibility hypothesis, which states that when more meaning is produced in the readers cognitive system while reading a text, more cognitive capacity is filled by reading it. Narrative passages produce mor...

Elaborate Analogies in Science Text: Tools for Enhancing Preservice Teachers' Knowledge and Attitudes.

Preservice teachers studied texts about three fundamentally important science concepts. They read versions with no analogy, versions with a simple analogy, and versions with an elaborate analogy. An elaborate analogy is one that consists of text and pictorial components in which similarities between the analog and the target concept are made explicit. Verbal and imagery processes combine to promote a mapping of conceptual features. The findings indicated that elaborate analogies improved the science knowledge and attitudes of preservice teachers by relating what is familiar to what is new. The findings are consistent with a constructivist view of learning science and suggest that science texts for preservice teachers should be adapted to take advantage of elaborate analogies in a systematic way.

The Impact of Inferences on Instructional Text

Publisher Summary This chapter examines the way inferences are related to the retention of information contained in instructional text. When natural instructional texts are written so that the reader must make many inferences to link different parts of the texts, the texts are retained poorly. This is probably because many of the readers fail to make the inferences. Because those readers do not link some parts of the text; therefore, they are unable to retrieve the information from those parts. When revised versions of the original natural texts remove the call to make inferences, the revised versions are retained significantly better than the originals. High-quality objects are constructed by experts who use imagination and judgment. The chapter describes the creation of an expertise-based theory of learnable instructional text. The expert writers of instructional text typically begin with an information base, often in the form of an original version. The inferences are defined algorithmically by a computer program using Kintschs propositionalization concepts. According to this, there are two types of inferences: (1) inferences requiring prior knowledge from outside the text and (2) inferences requiring prior knowledge from earlier in the text that had not been kept in mind.

Effects of text organization on memory: Test of a cognitive effort hypothesis with limited exposure time

Cirilo and Foss (1980) found that subjects spent more time reading important information than unimportant information in 12 stories. Important information was also free recalled better, reconfirming the ‘levels effect’. The reading time differences are consistent with a processing time hypothesis for the levels effect. This paper reports three experiments that support an alternative hypothesis based on cognitive effort. In Experiment 1, Cirilo and Fosss reading time findings were replicated. Then the subject‐controlled reading times observed in Experiment 1 were used in Experiments 2 and 3 to limit exposure times for important information to values less than those that had been self‐selected by the average subject. Experiment 2 showed that the levels effect in free recall was still present with exposure times limited. In Experiment 3, a secondary task technique was used to measure cognitive effort during the processing of important and unimportant information. Results showed that responses to secondary t...

Conceptions of Science Teacher Mentoring and Mentoring Practice in an Alternative Certification Program

Conceptions of mentoring held by six mentors and six beginning science teachers in an alternative certification program were explored qualitatively by means of case studies and phenomenography. Interviews with the six mentors and six beginning teachers produced 379 statements that were grouped into six conceptual categories. The categories of apprenticeship, personal support, and colearning revealed the variation in how mentors and beginning teachers conceptualized school-based mentoring. The conceptions functioned as referents for their mentoring practice. Mentoring as apprenticeship was the dominant conception among both the beginning teachers and mentors. The findings of this study imply that conceptions of mentoring held by mentors and beginning science teachers should be considered when organizing the school-based component of alternative certification programs.

Contextual Teaching and Learning of Science in Elementary Schools

Contextual Teaching and Learning (CTL) integrates inquiry, problem- and project-based learning, cooperative learning, and authentic assessment. Case studies were carried out on 21 teachers who used CTL to teach science in elementary schools to diverse groups of children. The findings indicated that the conditions that fostered the implementation of CTL strategies were a collaborative interaction with students, a high level of activity in the lesson, a connection to real-world contexts, and an integration of science content with other content and skill areas. Furthermore, the CTL strategies were best implemented when teachers used them in conjunction with sound classroom management techniques.

TEXT‐LEARNING CAPABILITIES OF OLDER ADULTS

Many researchers have found that older adults are unable to recall meaningful verbal information (i.e., words, sentences, and instructional text) as well as young adults. Available evidence suggests that the limited recall of older adults may in part result from the inefficient implementation of attentional and organizational processes. Educational gerontol‐ogists must investigate procedures that can increase the efficiency of older adults’ text‐learning skills. It is important that these empirical efforts be guided by models of memory (e.g., Craiks levels‐of‐processing approach) that are applicable to a population of elderly learners. These models can be used to identify text‐learning strategies that are appropriate for older adults. In general, these strategies should stimulate the construction of deep, elaborative memory traces. In particular, they should help older adults to do the following: (1) focus attention on key ideas, (2) organize information for storage and retrieval, and (3) integrate new i...

Writing Persuasive Documents: The Role of Students' Verbal Aptitude and Evaluation Anxiety.

AbstractTwo experiments examined the role that college students’ verbal aptitude, a cognitive variable, and evaluation anxiety, an affective variable, play in the production of persuasive letters. In both experiments, the students with higher verbal aptitude tended to obtain higher holistic ratings of letter quality, with fewer punctuation and spelling errors, than the students with lower aptitude. In addition, the students’ verbal aptitude and anxiety were inversely related. In Experiment 1, where time limits were imposed to pressure students, there was a weak relationship between anxiety and letter quality. There was also some support for the notion that poor verbal aptitude leads to anxiety. In Experiment 2, where time was unlimited, the relationship between anxiety and letter quality was no longer significant. Taken together, these findings suggest that students’ evaluation anxiety has little, if any, influence on the overall quality of their writing. In general, the findings were interpreted as provi...