The nature and methods of learning by doing.

This presentation reviews some of the psychological research on learning by doing and discusses the role that learning-by-doing approaches can play in education and training. It includes a discussion of the author's implementations of this approach and the lessons learned from these implementations. Improved forms of learning by doing now can be supported by information technologies, and there are prospects for extensions to group learning by doing and group learning from examples in the near future. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pictures and young children's learning from oral prose.

Reports 4 experiments examining the effects of overt illustration on 1st graders' learning from oral prose. A total of 132 Ss participated. In all experiments, Ss heard prose selections after (or during) which they illustrated selection content with plasticized figure cutouts and background scenes. Control Ss copied or colored geometric forms during the illustration period. After hearing 3 or 5 passages, Ss orally recalled passage content and answered simple factual questions about each passage. Illustration facilitated prose learning only when the S was given the correct pieces for his illustration or had the illustration done for him. When Ss selected the pieces for each illustration out of a common pool of 20-30 cutouts, illustration activity had either negative or no effect. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Imagery training and children's prose learning.

Used a pretest-posttest design to examine the effects of passage-illustration training (relative to a reading-practice control procedure) on reading comprehension in 10 3rd and 22 4th graders. Without this imagery training, imagery instructions did not improve performance on either a standardized reading comprehension test or a paraphrase prose recall procedure. After extended training in drawing adequate "comic strips" to illustrate prose passages, performance in a paraphrase recall task improved, but only when explicit imagery instructions were given with the task. The imagery training did not affect the standardized test performance, explicit imagery instructions notwithstanding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)