Review of Educational Research

The emphasis in this paper is on access, defined as the ability to draw on or utilize one’s intellectual resources in situations where those resources are relevant. A number of factors influence access. They have been identified in various strands of research representing different construct and curriculum perspectives. To date, few attempts have been made to synthesize this research. This is the purpose of the present paper, which utilizes a framework thought to have relevance across research domains. According to this framework, two factors influence students’ ability to access knowledge, strategy, and disposition. The first is organizational in nature, the second relates to the amount of reflective awareness possessed by the individual. This paper discusses how organization and awareness factors influence access in each of the informational categories and how teachers can better attend to these factors and thus promote access or transfer in students.

What can be done to empower students to be creative when they are faced with problems? One promising instructional technique for improving students’ understanding of scientific explanations is the use of conceptual models. This review examines three predictions concerning the effects of conceptual models on students’ understanding of scientific prose: that models improve recall of conceptual information, decrease verbatim retention, and increase creative solutions on transfer problems. In a review of 20 studies involving 31 separate tests, results consistently indicated that models can help lower aptitude learners to think systematically about the scientific material they study.

Aptitude-treatment interaction research has been plagued by conceptual and methodological problems that are evidenced in inconsistent results and unreplicated studies. These problems can be addressed, in part, by using meta-analytic techniques. These techniques were used in this study to test the effect of the interaction of prior achievement with instructional support on learning. This aptitude-treatment interaction was tested by assessing how the learning of subjects with different levels of prior achievement is effected by providing organizational and structuring instructional support as opposed to learner-controlled or self-paced instructional support. The results reveal an interaction that is consistent with the interpretation that there are greater differences in learning achievement between subjects with high prior achievement and subjects with low prior achievement when structuring and organizing support are provided and smaller differences between these subjects when instruction is self-paced. Although this study indicates that differences in achievement levels can be reduced through instructional treatment, further research is needed to evaluate other effects, such as total and subgroup mean achievement.

To examine the effects of whole language and language experience approaches on beginning reading achievement, a quantitative synthesis was performed on two data bases: the five projects conducted as part of the United States Office of Education (USOE) first grade studies and 46 additional studies comparing basal reading approaches to whole language or language experience approaches. The results of both analyses suggest that, overall, whole language/language experience approaches and basal reader approaches are approximately equal in their effects, with several exceptions. First, whole language/language experience approaches may be more effective in kindergarten than in first grade. Second, they may produce stronger effects on measures of word recognition than on measures of reading comprehension. Third, more recent studies show a trend toward stronger effects for the basal reading program relative to whole language/language experience methods. Fourth, whole language/language experience approaches produce weaker effects with populations labeled specifically as disadvantaged than they do with those not specifically labeled. Finally, studies with higher rated quality tend to produce lower effect sizes and the lowest effect sizes were found in studies that evaluated existing programs, as opposed to newly implemented experimental programs. These results are discussed within a stage model of reading that suggests that whole language/language experience approaches might be most effective for teaching functional aspects of reading, such as print concepts and expectations about reading, whereas more direct approaches might be better at helping students master word recognition skills prerequisite to effective comprehension.