This four-volume collection reprints key debates about exactly what it means to be literate and how literacy can best be taught. Rather than centering on the emotional reaction of mass media debates, this set focuses on research findings into processes and pedagogy. The themes covered include Literacy : its nature and its teaching, Reading - processes and teaching, Writing - processes and teaching and New Literacies - the impact of technologies.

In the words of Aldous Huxley, "Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting." Few people question the value of reading; in fact, most extol its virtues. As our culture becomes more complex, reading plays an increasingly greater role in satisfying personal needs and in promoting social awareness and growth. In the last 20 years, the teaching of this invaluable skill has focused so intensely on comprehension and prediction from context that it has lost sight of the significance of automaticity and fluency in the word-identification process. Reading is a synthesis of word recognition and comprehension; thus, this text is about these basic processes and their integration. A common plea from teachers today is that research and psychology be translated into teaching behavior. Therefore, the aim of this book is twofold: one, to identify, report, organize, and discuss those bits of data, research and theory that are most relevant to the teacher's understanding of the reading process; and two, to help educators to interpret and apply theory and research data to everyday classroom teaching, as well as to the problems encountered frequently in developmental and remedial teaching.

Since the mid-1970s, scientific and educational research has left a gap in the field of basic and applied research on transfer of learning. This book fills the gap with state-of-the-art information on recent research in the field, emphasizing methodological paradigms and interpretive concepts based on contemporary cognitive/information processing approaches to the study of human behavior. Issues discussed include how transfer is measured, how its direction and magnitude are determined, how training for transfer differs from training for acquisition, and whether different principles of transfer apply to motor, cognitive, and meta-cognitive processes.

There is a real need for a clear analysis and investigation of what the "crisis" in teaching actually is. By exploring the definition of the teaching crisis, investigating the evidence for its existence and reforms proposed to "solve" it, and studying the possible effects of proposed reforms, the authors of Crisis in Teaching address this need. Their work constitutes one of the first sustained and critical analyses of teachers and teaching in the contemporary situation. The authors, among the nation's leading critical thinkers in the field of education, reflect a variety of perspectives as they attempt to unravel the current rhetoric of crisis and question solutions that are, in effect, too often simplistic and superficial in their analyses and proposals.

Perkins reveals the common misguided strategies students use and offers teachers and parents advice on how they can help their children. Although there has been a great deal of impassioned debate over the sad state of American education today, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how children actually learn to think. But, as David Perkins demonstrates, we cannot solve our problems in this area simply by redistributing power or by asking children to regurgitate facts on a multiple choice exam. Rather we must ask what kinds of knowledge students typically acquire in school. In Smart Schools, Perkins draws on over twenty years of research to reveal the common misguided strategies students use in trying to understand a topic, and then shows teachers and parents what strategies they can use with children to increase real understanding.