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This article describes learning with media as a complementary process within which representations are constructed and procedures performed, sometimes by the learner and sometimes by the medium. It reviews research on learning with books, television, computers, and multimedia environments. These media are distinguished by cognitively relevant characteristics of their technologies, symbol systems, and processing capabilities. Studies are examined that illustrate how these characteristics, and instructional designs that employ them, interact with learner and task characteristics to influence the structure of mental representations and cognitive processes. Of specific interest is the effect of media characteristics on the structure, formation, and modification of mental models. Implications for research and practice are discussed Do media influence learning? The research reviewed in this article suggests that capabilities of a particular medium, in conjunction with methods that take advantage of

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which is/are unaval able. 12-1-84 CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF READING Technical Report No. 43

After two decades of intense research on reading, a number of teachers and researchers are beginning to ask whether a narrow focus on reading distorts our view of learning and whether a curriculum centered on reading constrains what can be done in the classroom. Because of these concerns, many have turned to literacy across the curriculum approaches. This report explores three models for the relation of literacy to larger curricular concerns: a Skills Model, an Instrumental Model, and an Inquiry Model. It explores in some depth the Inquiry Model's conception of the role of reading and writing within learning. A possible realization of this model is suggested through a detailed look at one college class session. Reading, it would be fair to say, is the driving force in U. S. schools today. Indications of the centrality of reading in current curricular thought can be seen in numerous public documents.

This report explores the hypothesis that recurring events lead to creating generic memories and to increased difficulty in recalling individual incidents. it describes research using cognitive theory as a basis for designing a two-part intervention procedure for facilitating recall of personal events,

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The authors wish to express their thanks to Joseph Campione for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Two studies are reported in which texts were systematically varied so as to vary the importance of inferences in the text. The central question investigated was whether variations in the importance of an inference would affect the probability that the inference would be made. While it is by now well established that inference plays a vital role in discourse comprehension and memory, the variables which control inferential processes are not yet fully identified or well understood. Indeed, much of the recent research on inference has simply sought to establish the existence and importance of inferential processes, and has failed to illuminate the controlling variables. While the effect of task variables on inference has received a fair amount of study, little attention has been paid to text variables.