In this article we demonstrate how to improve students' learning motivation by means of an attributional dialogue between teachers and students. The change in motivation is reflected in students' learning to attribute their achievements to their own educational efforts and to the use of appropriate learning strategies. The article exemplifies this procedure with dialogue pages of a typically achieving learner and a student with learning disabilities.

The paper describes the English Language Translation Program (LTP), as it is implemented in Israeli high schools. It further discusses the results of an empirical study designed to evaluate the students' achievements following the program. The LTP is a two-year option for the 11th and 12th grades. In a two-hour weekly course they practice written translation from English (L2) into Hebrew (L1), and discuss textually relevant translation problems with the aim of increasing language awareness and developing language competence. Evaluation of the program at the end of 1994 indicated that the LTP students improved the metalanguage skills related to translation, and also gained 5 extra percentage points in the regular English matriculation exams at the end of grade 12, compared to the non-LTP controls. Administrative, pedagogical, and conceptual problems in implementing the program are discussed.

A cross-language and a cross-culture validation of the Inventory of Learning Processes (ILP) is presented. Developed by Schmeck, Ribich, and Ramanaiah (1977), ILP was translated into Hebrew and administered to 302 undergraduate students at an Israeli university. A factor analysis of the data was compared to ILP's Deep Processing, Methodical Study, Fact Retention, and Elaborative Processing factors. There was a reasonable agreement between the two sets of factors. The internal consistency and intercorrelations among ILP factors were comparable to those of Schmeck et al. (1977) data, except one correlation. An analysis of ILP scales' scores revealed no sex differences, and the differences among student groups were comparable to other ILP studies. An item analysis indicated possible linguistic and cultural bias in several items of the inventory. Several characteristics of the missing data in this study were related to the serial position of the items in the inventory and to the students' sex and study year at the university. A reinterpretation of the factors was proposed in terms of encoding, retrieval, and internal processing styles.

Subjects read stories 1,400 words long and wrote 60- to 80-word summaries of these stores. Reading time was either unrestricted or limited, and the stories were either presented in natural order or with their paragraphs scrambled. Reading times were longer for the scrambled stories, but the same kind of summaries were produced whether stories were presented in natural or scrambled order. When a well-structured story was used, judges were unable to distinguish the two types of summaries and rated the adequacy of summaries based upon the scrambled version about as high as that of summaries based upon normal stories. For a less well-structured story, judges could differentiate between the summaries from natural and scrambled stories. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the story schema which permits subjects to comprehend scrambled stories by reorganizing them.

Titles can alter the comprehension of a text by affecting the selection of information from a text and the organization of this information in memory. Text comprehension is assumed to involve an organizational process that results in the formation of a text base, an ordered list of semantic units—propositions. The text base can be used as a retrieval scheme to reconstruct the text. Procedures for assigning propositions as more relevant to some themes as compared to other themes are developed and applied to texts. Texts with biasing titles were used in an experiment to demonstrate that immediate free recall is biased toward the theme emphasized in the title. The comprehension process which is guided by the text’s thematical information is described.

Short English texts, controlled for number of words and number of propositions, but differing in the number of word concepts in the text base (many versus few), were read and recalled immediately. Reading times were longer and recall was less for texts with many different word concepts than for texts with fewer word concepts. Superordinate propositions were recalled better than subordinate propositions and forgotten less when recall was delayed. The probability that a word concept was recalled increased as a function of both the number of repetitions of that concept in the text base and the number of repetitions of the corresponding word in the actual text. These results also obtained when subjects listened to the experimental paragraphs.