Basic Skills 



The basic skills program as a whole is con- 

 cerned with the learning, teaching, and measure- 

 ment of student achievement in reading, writing, 

 basic mathematics, and with the current legisla- 

 tive interest in establishment of educational stand- 

 ards. It is concerned also with aesthetic educa- 

 tion. 



Learning. The major current research priority in 

 the learning program is reading comprehension. 

 As a result of conferences held in the summers of 

 1973 and 1974, involving scientists from a variety 

 of fields and teachers of reading, the approach to 

 reading comprehension is that of current thinking 

 in cognitive psychology regarding the way human 

 beings process verbal information. This approach 

 stresses, for example, the importance of the read- 

 er's objective in reading a given piece of text and 

 sees the process of comprehension as a fitting of 

 what is being read to the content and conceptual 

 structure of the reader's existing knowledge, rath- 

 er than as an isolated assimilation of new informa- 

 tion. Grants competitions (FY 1977, FY 1978) call 

 for proposals in this area, and the FY 1978 com- 

 petition includes proposals in the process of writ- 

 ing, based on a conference in summer 1977. The 

 Center for the Study of Reading, established at 

 the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is 

 pursuing, with NIE support, a program of re- 

 search in the area of reading comprehension. 



In mathematics, a principal emphasis (with lim- 

 ited funds) is on applied research and develop- 

 ment relating to educational opportunities provid- 

 ed by the availability of increasingly sophisticated 

 hand-held calculators at low prices. In addition, a 

 conference has laid out a preliminary agenda for 

 research on fundamental processes in doing and 

 learning mathematics, and proposals are invited in 

 the FY 1978 competition. 



Examples of projects and papers include: 



John R. Anderson, Depiirtment of Psychology, Yule Universi- 

 ty, is developing and testing, with the use of a computer, a 

 general model of human learning and cognition with emphasis 

 on how children acquire cognitive procedures including skilled 

 reading processes. 



Wayne Wickelgren. Department of Psychology, University of 

 Oregon, is testing the hypothesis that one of the ways in which 

 skilled readers achieve high rates of speed is by making un- 

 conscious predictions about words that will appear in later 

 sentences based on earlier words or sentences in a text. 



Patricia A. Carpenter and Marcel Adam Just, Tracking Ongo- 

 ing Comprehension Processes, in Carpenter and Just (Eds.) 

 Cognitive Processes in Comprehension. Eribaum Associates, 

 Hillsdale, N. J., 1977 (in press). Authors use eye movements 

 to clarify the role of context in comprehension. 



Lawrence T. Erase, Purpose in Reading, in John T. Guthrie 

 (Ed.) Cognition. Curriculum, and Comprehension. Internation- 



al Reading Association: Newark, Delaware. 1977. and Carl H. 

 Frederiksen, Inference and the Structure of Children's Dis- 

 course, in R. Freedle (Ed), Discourse Processes: Advances in 

 Research and Theory. Erlbauni Associates, Hillsdale, N.J.. 

 1977 (in press) report on work by NIE statT members. 



Teaching. Research is increasingly supporting 

 the generalizations that most students can learn 

 most of what is expected of them given sufficient 

 time on tasks and that teaching effectiveness de- 

 pends more on longer term strategies fitted to the 

 subject matter and other conditions than on indivi- 

 dual minute-by-minute actions independent of con- 

 text. Exploring these strategies and their relation 

 to what is known about learning is a research 

 priority at this time. 



A conference of researchers and educators held 

 in 1974 recommended a number of research direc- 

 tions. The Institute for Research in Teaching at 

 Michigan State University is pursuing one of 

 them — studies of teaching as clinical information 

 processing. Another — investigating the nature of 

 classroom discourse and its relation to learning — is 

 the subject of a FY 1978 grants competition. 



For example, in one project, Walter Doyle and 

 Ruth J. Karth, College of Education, North Texas 

 State University, are studying information pro- 

 cessing responses that students use to interpret 

 teachers' actions and to select strategies for learn- 

 ing. 



Measurement and methodology. Valid measures 

 and means of analyzing the data they yield are at 

 the heart of any science. Currently there is consi- 

 derable concern about the suitability of many ex- 

 isting tests for making judgments about student 

 abilities, knowledge, skills, and learning difficul- 

 ties. For example, tests are thought generally to 

 be capable of measuring only a fraction of what is 

 taught and learned, to be biased in favor of stu- 

 dents from middle and upper class majority fami- 

 lies, and not to be based on an understanding of 

 learning processes. There is great interest in mov- 

 ing from norm-referenced tests — designed to 

 spread students out on a spectrum, principally 

 for administrative purposes — to criterion-refer- 

 enced tests — designed to measure how much each 

 student has learned of what was being taught. 

 Although some of the work to be done in improv- 

 ing testing and analysis of test results can be re- 

 garded as technological development, there are 

 also important basic questions to be addressed. 

 The Measurement and Methodology Division is 

 supporting such research through grants competi- 

 tions. 



For example, in one project, Robert B. Davis, 

 Curriculum Laboratory, University of Illinois- 

 Urbana, is developing a description of the cogni- 

 tive growth process in the learning of elementary 



HEALTH. EDUCATION AND WELFARE 113 



