The method for teaching reading and writing called Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition or CIRC (Slavin, Madden, Dolan & Wasik, 1996; Stevens & Slavin, 1995a, 1995b) is the subject of a great deal of research and deserves particular attention. CIRC, with appropriate adaptations, has been applied to teaching reading and writing to language minority children, primarily Spanish speakers in the United States (Calderon, Hertz-Lazarowitz & Slavin, 1998) as well as to Arab children in Israel (Hertz-Lazarowitz, 1999).

In the study carried out in Texas (Calderon, Hertz-Lazarowitz & Slavin, 1998), 220 second and third graders in a Spanish bilingual program were evaluated in terms of their reading and writing progress in English after participating in the Bilingual CIRC program for several years. Interested readers will learn from the original publication just how the15 steps of the BCIRC program were implemented. Results showed that "students in transitional bilingual programs...(gained) in Spanish and English reading performance as a result of experiencing cooperative learning in second and third grades. The more years students are in the program, the better their English reading performance: students who experience 2 years of BCIRC in second and third grades score almost one standard deviation higher than comparison students in reading."

Thinking and Talking
Research reported by Lonning (1993) is of considerable interest and originality. His study focuses on the instructional conditions required for getting students to change their ideas about given phenomena (such as specific theories about various aspects of matter). When the students' original notions are naive, the change in their thinking consequent to carefully planned learning experiences is expected to be in the direction of more scientifically accurate conceptions and/or explanations.

Unlike traditional instruction that presents pre-planned information to students, this "conceptual change" approach emphasizes the need for teachers to learn about the ideas that students bring with them to the study of a given subject. Students are urged to make their ideas explicit to themselves, to their peers and to teachers. Comparing their ideas to others' may lead them to develop a degree of dissatisfaction with their own ideas, which is a necessary first step toward changing them and/or exchanging them for new and better ones.

Lonning wished to examine the possibility that the Learning Together approach facilitates students' opportunities for disclosing, discussing, and comparing their ideas on the subject of the particle theory of matter. Students were given a list of 7 propositions about the particle theory of matter, and were asked to use these propositions to describe, explain, and predict unfamiliar events. Details about this procedure, the materials employed, and the creative system used by the investigator to evaluate changes in students' ideas, appear in the research report (Lonning, 1993). Students' verbal interactions were also evaluated by assigning them to one of three categories: statements of support, conflict statements, and requests for help.

Thirty-six low achieving students in a 10^th grade science course (Connecticut, USA) participated in this study, half of whom were in the Learning Together groups, and half in traditional lab groups. Analysis of the data indicate that students in the Learning Together groups changed from using misconceptions to correct conceptions about twice as often as did their peers in the control group. Regarding verbal interactions, students in the cooperative groups used each of the 11 types of verbal interaction considerably more than the students in the control group.

Shachar and Sharan (1988, 1994) examined the effects of the Group Investigation method on 8^th grade students' academic achievement (in history and geography), on their use of cognitive strategies during a group discussion, and on their verbal interaction. The study was carried out in a large urban junior high school in Israel located in a neighborhood with a high background).