The Suchman Inquiry Model and

the Teaching of Current English

Yuko Takeshita(Seikei University)

I. Introduction

This is an attempt to employ the Suchman Inquiry Model, one of the pri-

mary approaches to Information Processing') , in instruction of the English

language for university students with its focus on current topics.

II. The Information Processing Approach to Learning

The idea of Information Processing was introduced by B. Joyce and M.

Weil in Models of Teaching and was defined as " . . . the ways in which peo-

ple handle stimuli from the environment, organize data, sense problems,

generate concepts and solutions to problems, and employ verbal and non-verbal symbols ". It aims at acquiring knowledge through an analysis

and transformation of data from the environment into a more useful and

usable form.

In an Information Processing approach to learning, the student is an

active inquirer of his/her environment, not a passive recipient of knowledge

or stimuli. He/she is engaged in energetic involvement in the learning pro-

cess. Meaningful and purposeful learning by an autonomous learner is en-

couraged, while rote memorization of pieces of knowledge discouraged.

The teacher's objectives in the approach are to help students acquire useful

information, or content2), and to help them develop thinking skills, or pro-

cess skills3).

Specifically, students are expected to reach certain content through ob-

servationo and inference, the two fundamental skills in Information Process-

ing. Inferences, the extentions of observations, serve to summarize, ex-

plain, or utilize observations to make predictions. Raw data gathered by

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observation are processed into a more abstract, general and usable form by

inference. For instance, an infant who has had the first experiences of see-

ing different dogs with four legs (observations) may determine that every dog

has four legs (generalizing inference), which will be stored in his/her brain

as useful information (content). According to Paul D. Eggen et al., the

acquisition of an ability to make accurate inferences based on adequate ob-

servations, and to tell the validity of others' inferences will result in clear

and critical thinking, and such an ability can be improved through prac-

tice.

III. The Suchman Inquiry Model

The activities of the Suchman Inquiry Model have the primary purpose

of helping students learn to make explanatory inferences based on observable information. The model is more process oriented, designed to teach think-

ing skills, although the content and process goals are so interdependent that

it is hardly possible to reach one while ignoring the other. A typical lesson

using the model proceeds in the following five major steps.

(1) The teacher presents a problem which requires students to pro-vide an explanation for the reason why some phenomenon has taken

place.(2) The students hypothesize a possible solution to the problem,

respectively.

(3) They gather data to test their hypothesis in the form of questions to the teacher which are answerable yes or no.

(4) They revise the hypothesis according to the necessity.(5) They repeat the previous two steps until an appropriate hypo-

thesis accounting for all the data they have gathered is found.

The content outcome of the lesson, therefore, is the development of ex-

planation. While the students are trying to form an explanation in order to attain the content goal, they are also developing their process skills, by

improving their ability to form and critically examine and judge explanatory

inferences, relating data to the explanations they have formed.

In the first step above, the teacher always initiates a lesson by presenting

a problem for his/her students to solve. The important thing here is that

the teacher should be well aware of the background experience and fore-

『時 事 英 語 学 研 究 』No . XXVII(1988年9月) 79

knowledge of the students, so that the level of the problem may match the

level to which the learners are sophisticated: they do need certain amount

of knowledge in advance to be able to form, reject or revise inferences.

Much effort is put into motivating the students by structuring the problem.

properly, viz. in a discrepant way: if the students realize that an event is. developed " in a way that doesn't seem intuitively sensible " (Eggen et al..

15), their curiosity is aroused and their motivation to find a satisfactory

explanation for that discrepancy is enhanced.5) The type of event and the

characteristics of the students contribute to the teacher's selection of teach-

ing- and learning-aids, the mediums for presenting the event, such as films,.

audio tapes, graphs, tables, written scenarios, etc. These aids serve to moti-

vate and provide the learners with sufficient data to initiate the next steps.

The following phases are hypothesizing and data gathering. Suchman.

has several procedural rules in order to place the responsibility on the stu-

dents for forming hypotheses, gathering data and arriving at the final ex-

planation, so that they may experience meaningful inquiry activities. The rules include the following.

(1) The students should gather data by asking questions to which the teacher can give answers with a yes or no. (Prohibiting the learners from asking why frees the teacher, who acts merely as information source, from taking the responsibility of providing the solution to the problem.).

(2) The students should gather data by asking questions whose answers are obtainable through the process of observation alone.

(3) A student, once called on, may ask as many questions as he/she wants to before the next person takes his/her turn. (This allows a student to plan an orderly sequence of questions without struggling to form one complex question to gain more than one piece of information.)

(4) The students should be allowed and encouraged to cooperate with each other as much as possible. (Suchman considers it natural for peo-

ple in the real world to work together in a problem-solving situation.)

The hypothesizing ata-gathering hypothesizing cycle continues until the students finally arrive at a satisfactory explanation for themselves. By

relating data they have gathered to hypotheses they have formed, combining

hypotheses they have confirmed, and rejecting those they have disproved,

they can successfully reach an explanatory inference that accounts for all

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existing data.

IV. The Suchman Inquiry Lesson in Current English

Suchman Inquiry lesson plans dealing with two newspaper articles will be

presented below. The author will make the grouping to be rather homo-

geneous in respect to age, sex and intellectual possibilities, the lessons being intended especially for female students at the university level.

1) Article1

This is an article (Sacramento Bee) for the students to read after all the

Suchman activities are completed.

US leads in rate of Caesarean birthsBOSTON (UPI)—The United States leads 19 of the most indus-

trialized nations in the rate of Caesarean section births performed each year, but the practice is increasing worldwide, according to a survey released Wednesday.

Researchers at the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Md., analyzed Caesarean rates in countries in Europe, North America and the Pacific between 1970 and 1983.

The United States clearly had the highest rate, with about one in five of all live births in hospitals occurring through Caesarean section—mak-ing it 50 percent to 200 percent more common than in most other countries.

Caesarean sections involve removing the baby from the womb through an incision in the abdomen instead of delivering the child through the natural birth canal. The procedure is done when problems occur dur-ing childbirth, but it subjects women to possible complications.

Although Canada had Caesarean rates similar to those in the United States, most other countries' rates were much lower. Czechoslovakia, for example, had the lowest rate-6 percent. Denmark's was about 13

percent.The researchers, who reported their findings in today's New England

Journal of Medicine, said younger women were much more likely to undergo a Caesarean in the United States than elsewhere. And once women have undergone a Caesarean, they are much more likely to give birth through Caesarean in subsequent pregnancies.

Only 5 percent of American women whose last birth was a Caesarean had follow-up births vaginally, the study found. By comparison, the figure was 32 percent in Hungary.

『時事英語学研究』No. XXVII(1988年9月) 81

Presentation of the problem

The following are among presentable problems providing the learners with

some background and relevant knowledge which is informative and useful

for reading the above article, as well as with opportunities to improve their

inferential skills6).i) Look at Figure 1 describing the rate of Caesareans7) per a hundred

hospital deliveries in various countries. Researchers have shown that the rate of Caesarean sections in the US, which tops the chart, has increased sharply, from 5.5% in 1970 to 22.7% in 1985, despite health officials' efforts to encourage obstetricians to attempt more non-surgical deliveries. Look also at the cartoon, Medicine 1985, published in an American newspaper. Seeking for the way the cartoon is related to the figure, provide a solution to the following problem: Why are there so many Caesarean sections in the US ?

Rate

ii) Look at Figure 1 again. The U.S. and Canadian rates clearly stand out as distinctly higher than the others, with the exception of Australia') . Why do the two countries have a similar trend in the Caesarean-section rate?

iii) Researchers have detected that the percentage of American moth-ers who had a vaginal birth after a previous Caesarean section was only 5, while it was much higher in many other countries ; 43 in Norway,

Figure 1, .Cesarean-Section Rates per 100 Hospital Defiveries in Selected Countries 1981.

Asterisks denote incomplete coverage.

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41 in Bavaria, 39 in Scotland, etc. Why are there so many repeat Caesareans in the US?

The following points are to be noted in presenting the problems. Al-

though the author has presented the three problems in a raw format merely

for convenience' sake, the presentation of the first problem is to be followed,

in a real classroom situation, by hypothesizing and data gathering processes;

the discovery of the solution to the first event should precede the posing of the second problem, and so forth. Secondly, the teacher poses the problems

orally as a rule, so that the students can practice listening comprehension.

Thirdly, however, since the activity is not centered around enhancing stu-

dents' memory, each problem may ideally be placed, after the oral presenta-

tion, on an overhead, chalkboard, handout, etc. and remain available through-

out the lesson; the learners, then, can concentrate on seeking for the solution

without worrying about memorizing the details of the event, and thus ex-

perience a lower level of anxiety.Hypothesizing and data gathering

It is ideal that the presentation of the problem is followed by hypothesizing

a possible explanation, and that students start gathering data through ques-

tioning in hope of approving their own hypothesis in mind. It is probable

and permissible, however, that they gather data without having any par-

ticular hypothesis if they are not capable of forming one at this stage. A

possible hypothesis will certainly come up as they proceed with asking ques-tions, and once formed, their data gathering will have clearer directions.

The development of thinking skills will be attained in either way.

The author will show some of the possible data-gathering questions for the

three problems above, with the corresponding answers in brackets.

i) Data-gathering questions for the first problem.

(1) Is the cost of malpractice insurance very high in the US? [yes](2) Are there many cases of malpractice suits in the US? [yes](3) Is the medicine in the US much more advanced than that in the

other nations? [no]

(4) Is the C-section rate for women of lower parity high in the US? [yes]

(5) Are all the C-sections performed in the US necessary from a medical point of view? [no]

『時事英語学研究』No. XXVII(1988年9月) 83

Here are a few examples of questions which are unacceptable under the

procedural rules described above. Those who ask improper questions will be instructed by the teacher to rephrase them.

(1) What does the snake in the cartoon stand for? [not answerable yes or no]

(2) Is it important to know why health officials have encouraged the doctors to have normal deliveries? [not observable]

(3) Does the parity of a pregnant woman have something to do with the solutions? [not observable]

ii) Data-gathering questions for the second problem.

(1) Has the C-section rate in Canada also increased sharply in recent years? [yes]

(2) Do many American doctors practice in the US and Canada at the same time? [no]

(3) Do health officials in Canada encourage obstetricians to perform C-sections? [no]

(4) Are there often repeat Caesareans in Canada? [yes]

iii) Data-gathering questions for the third problem.

(1) Is the percentage of women with lower parity who undergo a C-section much higher in the United States than in other countries?

[yes](2) Are American obstetricians authoritarian toward their patients

in deciding delivery method? [no](3) Does a woman with previous Caesarean delivery have to abandon

normal delivery in the subsequent pregnancy? [not necessarily9)]

Closure

Going through the hypothesizing data-gathering hypothesizing cycle,

with the teacher's implicit and explicit leading of the students toward ap-

propriate direction whenever necessary, the learners will reach the explana-tion/explanations accounting for all existing data as a result of revisions.

Here are possible solutions to the above problems.

i) One of the major forces that have driven the rate of surgical de-liveries upward in the US is strong adherence to the famous " once a Caesarean always a Caesarean " philosophy. More importantly, an-other reason is the existence of fear of malpractice suits among the doctors: the number of malpractice suits filed in the US tripled in the

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last decade, forcing insurance companies to drop coverage or to drasti-cally increase premiums.

ii) Considering the similarities in culture and social system, geo-

graphical factors, communicability, etc., one might expect to find similar obstetrical practice in the two countries. The Canadian trend toward frequent Caesarean sections closely parallels that of the United States.

iii) The "once a section always a section " obstetrical norm is quite

popular not only among the doctors but among expecting mothers as well. Many doctors, who have opted for first-time Caesareans without much deliberation in an effort to lower risks, prefer repeat Caesareans, although as many as 70% of women who had previous Caesareans could be candidates to try normal labor in subsequent births. The women, too, may easily agree to the doctors' suggestion to be on the safer side.

2) Article 2

This is an article (Lobsenz 8) for the students to read before starting any

Suchman activities.

SHOULD A WIFE KEEP HER NAME ?Encouraged by feminism to maintain their separate identities, many-

brides have chosen to keep their maiden name or to combine it some-how with their husband's name. Yet the emotional problems that arise from this decision have made some women think twice.

" I felt an obligation to carry on the family name and heritage," says Catherine Bergstrom-Katz, an actress. " But I also believed that com-bining our names was the fair thing to do; if I was going to take my husband's name, the least he could do was take mine."

Her husband's legal name now is also Bergstrom-Katz. Though he does not use it at work, it is on all the couple's legal document—mort-

gage, house deed, insurance and credit cards. Mail comes addressed to both spouses under their own names, their hyphenated name and, says Catherine, " sometimes to 'Allan Bergstrom.' " The couple's first child was named Sasha Bergstrom-Katz.

Not all wives are so adamant. Some use their maiden name in busi-ness and their husband's name socially. And a growing number of women who once insisted on hyphenating maiden and married names have dropped the hyphen and are using the maiden name as a middle name.

Despite the popular use of linked, merged or shared names, " there is still a surprising amount of opposition to the idea," says Terri Tepper,

『時事英語学研究』No. XXVII(1988年9月) 85

who for many years ran an information center in Barrington, Ill., ad-vising women who wished to retain their maiden names. Family coun selors point out that it triggers highly emotional reactions, not only be-tween the couple but also among parents and in-laws. " What about your silver and linens? " one woman asked her daughter. " How can I have them monogrammed if you and Bill have different names? "

While such concerns may seem relatively trivial, there are others that raise significant issues.

Control and commitment. " Names have always been symbols of

power," says Constance Ahrons, a therapist at the University of South-ern California. " To a modern woman, keeping her name is a symbol of her independence. But a man may feel that implies a lack of com-mitment to him and to the marriage." Thus when a San Diego woman told her fiance she had decided to keep her name, he was hurt. "Aren't

you proud to be my wife? " he asked.Most men are more understanding. When Maureen Poon, a pub-

licist, married Russell Fear, her English-Irish husband sympathized with his wife's desire to preserve her Chinese-Japanese heritage, espe-cially since she was an only child. " We began married life as Poon-Fear," says Maureen. " I've since dropped the hyphent just con-fuses too many people but Russell continues to use it when we're out together. He feels that we are Poon-Fear,' that we are one."

Cultural difference. " Men raised in a macho society find it hard to accept a wife who goes by her own name," says Dr. Judith Davenport,, a clinical social worker. For example, New York-born Jennifer Selvy, now a riding instructor in Denver, says her Western-rancher fiance was horrified that she wanted to keep her name. " What will my friends say? " he protested. " Nobody will believe we're married! " His dis-tress was so real that Selvy reluctantly yielded.

What to name the children. When couples began hyphenating sur-names, it was amusing to consider the tongue-twisters that might plague the next generation. But psychologists point out that youngsters with complex names are often teased by classmates or embarrassed if their

parents have different names. And how does one explain to grand-parents that their grandchild, apple of their eye, will not be carrying on the family name?

Given the difficulties of keeping one's maiden name in a society that has not yet fully adjusted to the idea, should a woman make the effort to do so?

" Clearly, yes, if the name has value to her in terms of personal, family or professional identity," says Alan Loy McGinnis, co-director

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of the Valley Counseling Center in Glendale, Calif. " But if keeping

one's maiden name makes either spouse feel less secure about the relationship, perhaps the couple needs to find another way to symbolize

mutual commitment. After all, marriage today needs all the reinforce- ment it can get."

Presentation of the problemi) It is taken for granted in Japan, because of Article 750 of the

Civil Law Act")that a woman take her spouse's family name in mar- riage. In the United States, on the other hand, many women have chosen to keep their maiden name in some way as you have read in the article.

i-1) Speaking from the cultural point of view, why do many American women stick to their maiden name?i-2) In view of their social activities, why do many American women stick to their maiden name?i-3) Being in a state, e.g. California, where divorce is rather fre-

quent, why do many American women stick to their maiden name? ii) It is less probable that Japanese husbands would be sympathetic

to their wives if they wished not to take their spouses' surname. Why are many American men, on the other hand, tolerant toward women who choose to keep their maiden name?

Hypothesizing and data gathering

As students have already read the above article in advance of Suchman

activities, they are provided with various hints for solving the problems.

In this case, more students may be able to hypothesize possible explanations

before they start gathering data.

The author will show some of the possible data-gathering questions for the

problems above, with the corresponding answers in brackets.

i-1) Data-gathering questions for part one of the first problem.(1) Are there many cross-cultural marriages in the US? [yes](2) Does a person have to change his/her family name in some way

in case of naturalization or immigration? [no]

(3) Does a name suggest where the person, or his/her ancestor, is from? [sometimes yes]

i-2) Data-gathering questions for part two of the first problem.

(1) Do American women, especially working women, feel any dis-advantage when they have to change their surname? [yes]

『時 事英語学研究』No .XXVII(1988年9月) 87

(2) Do many American women, like Japanese young women, think of working temporarily until they get married? [usually no]

(3) Are there many married women in the US who are business people and homemakers at once? [yes]

(4) Are those business people ambitious to be promoted to a higher position in their working place? [usually yes]

i-3) Data-gathering questions for part three of the first problem.

(1) Can it trigger a divorce in the US that a woman can support herself economically? [yes]

(2) Does an American woman return to her maiden name when she gets divorced? [usually yes]

(3) Do American women have the consciousness that they have their own share of the property between husband and wife? [yes]

ii) Data-gathering questions for the second problem. (1) Do they tend to stick to old traditions? [no](2) Is America a society where people have a respect for individual-

ism? [yes]

(3) Are Americans more sensitive to sexual equality than Japanese? [yes]

ClosureHere are possible solutions to the above problems.

i-1) The United States is a nation where there are people with dif-ferent racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural backgrounds.Compared with Japanese names, most of which are " Japanese-sound-ing," some American names may clearly represent a particular back-

ground and a family history. In case of a marriage of a couple with different ancestries and heritages, the wife may wish to preserve the family name in some way.

i-2) The women, especially the working women with their respon-sibility for, passion for, and philosophy about work, do not prefer to suffer disadvantages and inconvenience brought by the change of sur-names. Committing themselves to marriage, they also hope to secure independence, and persisting in their name is one of its symbols.

i-3) Living in California, for example, where one out of two mar-riages is destined to fail, many married women have a strong sense of their"self". They are ready to claim a fair share of the couple's property, whenever the action is necessary, and they want to be as

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economically independent as possible. Maintaining their maiden name is one form of self-assertion as a free, independent and equal sharer of the married life. The divorce rate being very high, they may have to return to their maiden name anyway.

ii) As the United States holds herself to be a land of freedom where individuality and individualism are emphasized over conformity, her

people, whether male or female, might well accept it as a basic human right to hope to preserve one's name. Also, the society is rather flexible and open to things new, without being bound by old traditions and idee fixes. It is also probable, considering the fact that there is still a vestige of the pioneer days to treasure women, that the men are tolerant about the women's desire.

V. Conclusion

To summarize the previous sections on the Suchman Inquiry Model, the

model has the following advantages in general when it is implemented in a classroom.

(1) Because of the interaction between the teacher and the students, there is much participation and involvement of the learners in the learning activity.

(2) It puts the teacher in a position to be accepting students which results in lessening their anxiety and promoting their concentration.

(3) It is flexible enough for the teacher to incorporate with other models to create his/her own way toward accomplishment of his/her

particular instructional goals.(4) The lesson proceeds in a systematic, organized way. (5) It cultivates students' critical thinking, bringing them to an

intellectually higher level.

(6) It is highly motivational with the appropriate presentation of the problem.

It has been mentioned that this model, as well as all the others in the

Information Processing, has both the content and process goals. When it

is implemented in an English course, however, it has a third goal, the im-

provement of the learners' language skills. Thus, a Suchman Inquiry Model in a current English course should be examined from the three as-

pects.

『時事英語学研究』No.XXVII(1988年9月) 89

The process goal needs most attention. The aim is to help students make

explanatory inferences, and eventually to develop their thinking skills. It

is strongly against learning by rote memorization, to which Japanese students

have long been too accustomed. Here is a passage from A Report from the

U.S. Study of Education in Japan.

A basic characteristic of Japanese secondary education and high school and university entrance examinations is adherence to the view that there is only one right answer. Generally speaking, the premium is on mastery of factual material, often through drill and memorization, rather than on analysis, investigation, and critical thinking.

The Suchman Inquiry Model allows students to experience quite dif-

ferent approaches to learning: observation, analysis, inference, hypothesis,

critical thinking, etc. Because people do not think uniformly, reaching

various conclusions via various routes, there should hardly be the only answer

to any problem. In a Suchman lesson, the teacher can be as flexible as to

accept a solution which he/she believes to be eighty percent correct, if it is

the fruit of exertion of a student's inferential skill. The teacher is never the

provider of the answer, in the first place, partly because the responsibility is

placed in the hand of the learners to find their way to a solution, and partly because he/she need not have a complete solution or what he/she can call a

perfect answer, either. This is one of the reasons why the process goal is usually emphasized over the content goal.

Of the two exemplary lessons above, forming hypotheses may be more

difficult for the problems with the first article, because there seems to be

more room for inferencing. Hypotheses may come up more easily with the

second article, for the activity takes place after the content of the article

has been understood by the learners. The advantage of having read the

article in advance to the Suchman activity is that the scope of the event is

rather narrow: Eggen et al. state that the " narrowing of a problem pro-

vides a better sense of direction for students and makes it easier for them

to begin gathering data ", and that the narrower focus increases the

chance for the entire class to view the problem uniformly, so that miscon-

ceptions about the task at hand may be reduced. Forming hypotheses

without much difficulty means there is less emphasis on the process goal

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than on the content goal. In such a case, the teacher may well hope his/her

students to come up with a better explanation, its accuracy being as close as

a hundred percent, should the process not be very complicated.

Considered differently, however, having completed all the Suchman ac-

tivity before reading an article makes it easier for the students to understand

the content of the article, since they have already been familiar with much

of its background as well as the terminology used in the passages. In the

two cases above, students may find it rather easy to read the first article, "US leads in rate of Caesarean births ," its content being a sort of sum-mary for the previous inquiry lesson.

It is completely up to the teacher how much emphasis he/she would like

to put on what goal. Either goal will be attained in a Suchman Inquiry

lesson, since, as has already been mentioned above, it is hardly possible to

reach one of the goals while not attaining, if to some extent, the other goal.

The teacher's decision will depend upon the nature of the article, the amount

of background knowledge the students possess, their linguistic skills, etc.

The last goal for the teacher to take into account is the improvement of

the students' English. In case of using written materials for presenting a

problem, the teacher may primarily let the learners listen to the problem before he/she shows it visually, so that their ears can be trained. It may

be inevitable that the learners should construct a hypothesis in their native

language, unless the teacher asks them to announce it in English, which

he/she is not likely to do in the usual classroom procedure.11) As a matter

of fact, the revised version of hypotheses, or the solution to a problem is

supposed to come out in English in the closure as a result of the data-gather-

ing activity. Therefore, the teacher could advise the learners to attempt forming a hypothesis in English, as long as doing so will not hamper the

process goal of developing their inferencial skills.The data-gathering phase is where the students' language skills function

most actively. Only when the teacher decides that a student lacks the pro-

ficiency necessary for experiencing a meaningful Suchman activity, can he/

she allow a question to be asked in Japanese. Certain amount of time

should be allocated to the teacher's commenting upon the English used by

the students: the teacher may be interested in correcting improper usages

『時 事 英 語 学 研 究 』No .XXVII(i988年9 .月) 91

of the language in grammar, or in suggesting better ways of expression.

Except for requesting the students to rephrase questions that are not ac-

ceptable under the procedural rules, however, correction should occur after the closure, in order not to interfere with the learners' stream of thought.

When the process goal of helping the learners develop their thinking skill and our third goal of helping them improve their linguistic proficiency are

attained, the learners have effectively experienced the process of thinking in

English, and this is one of the important skills for a learner of the English

language to accomplish.

As has been clear to the reader, the implementation of the Suchman

Inquiry Model needs lots of careful planning and preparation on the teach-

er's part. A Suchman lesson itself can be quite time-consuming, and one

may find it much more complicated and troublesome than just to select sev-

eral articles to read in a newspaper or magazine and to give, in the learners'

and teacher's native language, brief lectures on the issues. The author

agrees with Eggen et al., however, in that a resourceful teacher is one " who

possesses a repertoire of teaching models that can be applied at appropriate times " because " no single approach to teaching is appropriate in all situa tions " and consequently, effective teaching requires alternative strategies

to accomplish different goals ".

The author is well aware that the model is quite "American " in many

ways, and that it may need some modification before it is implemented

comfortably in a Japanese classroom. Knowing that it is no more than a

tentative, however, she presents this unique methodology in the hope of adding some varieties in the instruction of the English language with a focus

on current topics.

Notes 1) Other approaches to Information Processing include the Concept Attainment Model for teaching concepts, the Taba Model for teaching generalizations, and the Ausubel Model for teaching interrelated bodies of content containing a number of concepts or generalizations.

2) Content is the knowledge resulting from processing information and stored in the brain, so as to be used in future information processing attempts. It usually exists in three forms—facts, concepts and generalizations.

3) Processes are the intellectual skills or capabilities required to analyze informa-

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tion. They include the ability to make observations and, through the use of infer-ence, to generalize, to predict and to explain events.

4) Observations, whether by sights, sounds, tastes, tactile sensations or smells, and especially vicarious ones, play very important part in the enlargement of the scope of our knowledge. Precise observations will lead to gathering accurate information, and, ultimately, to a better understanding of the world.

5) Admitting that not every problem can be presented in a discrepant way, Eggen et al. emphasize that the " more discrepant a problem is, the more motivating it may be." See Eggen et al., p. 318.

6) The figure was taken from " Comparisons of National Cesarean-Section Rates " and the cartoon from Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year-1986 Edition.

7) The teacher had better be prepared orally to give a definition of a word or a

phrase in the presentation, such as " Caesareans " or " Caesarean sections," if he/ she doubts its familiarity to the learners. The clarity of the problem to the students is essential in Suchman activities.

8) The author has decided the Australian rate to be unreliable because of the fol-lowing fact described in the research paper. " Information from Australia pertained to the states of New South Wales and Queensland . . . " covering only 50% of all the births. " Because of variability in cesarean rates from one state to another, Australian national rates may differ substantially from those reported here." See The New England Journal of Medicine, p. 386.

9) As his/her aim is helping students reach an appropriate explanatory inference, the teacher's answer, based on factual information, may be as flexible as this one.

10) The article forces one of a married couple to abandon the surname of his/her single days.

11) This is probably done in the evaluation of the students in the Suchman Inquiry Model, in which written tests are preferable: the learners may be asked, out of a

given event, to provide a hypothesis, and some data-gathering questions that aims at approving the hypothesis.

Works Cited

Brooks, Charles, ed. Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year-1986 Edition. Gretna, La.:Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., 1986.

Dorfman, Cynthia Hearn, ed. A Report from the U.S. Study of Education in Japan. U.S. Department of Education. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987.

Eggen, Paul D., Donald P. Kauchak, and Robert J. Harder. Strategies for Teachers.Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1979.

Joyce, B., and M. Weil. Models of Teaching. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972.

Lobsenz, Norman. " Should a Wife Keep Her Name? " Parade Magazine of Sacramento Bee. Dec. 7, 1986: 8.

Notzon Francis C., Paul J. Placek, and Selma M. Taffel. " Comparisons of National Cesarean-Section Rates " The New England Journal of Medicine 316. 7 (1987): 387.

Sacramento Bee, Feb. 12, 1987.