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This conference presentation describes how students develop the cognitive processes through which they acquire knowledge from their classroom experiences. The data were taken from five studies of individual students' classroom experience and its relationship to the learning of curriculum content in typical science and social studies units in the upper elementary school. Data on classroom experience were obtained from simultaneous video-recordings, audio-recordings with individual microphones, and continuous observation of selected students. Data on student learning came from tests and interviews conducted before and after each unit and 12 months later. The resulting model of knowledge acquisition, which predicted with 80 percent success exactly which curriculum concepts and propositions each student learned and remembered 12 months later is described. The conditions of knowledge acquisition and the role of working memory in the sorting and organizing of experience are described. The paper then develops a theory of internalization from the work of Piaget, Vygotsky, and others, and examples of the classroom experiences of students are used to describe how students participate simultaneously in the public, semi-private, and private worlds of the classroom. Evidence for the private world is taken from individually recorded self-talk. Five activities/processes that are involved in acquiring knowledge from classroom experience are described both as simultaneously private processes and social activities. The transactional relationship between the enactment of these processes in the public, semi-private, and private worlds of students' experience provides the conditions for their internalization. Contains 59 references. (Author/KB)

1Boy Crusoe

By Allan Eric

Also published as" A Yankee Crusoe" . A 15 year old hard working and studious farm boy finds the lure of adventure on the seas as a merchant seaman more than he can resist. This is his story. " I was born in a little town in the State of Maine, near the close of the Civil War. My boyhood life did not differ materially from that of the average farmer's son in the remote country districts of New England--except, perhaps, that I read more and thought more. Hard work on the rugged soil, two terms each year in the little yellow country schoolhouse, a day's fishing now and then filled the early years of my life full to over-flowing. " What he gets is enough excitement and adventure to overflow his wildest dreams. How he experiences disaster and uses his wits and knowledge to overcome every problem makes for a great read. - Summary by Phil Chenevert