How people learn is a subject of endless fascination, and scholars from many disciplines have applied themselves to it with enormous energy. Certainly there has been no dearth of research on learning. In recent years the federal government has underwritten a great deal of it, and the Ford Foundation, among other private groups, has supported various aspects--ranging from the investigations of Jean Piaget and his collaborators to studies at Rockefeller University of how individuals from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds develop and apply various learning skills. But it became increasingly evident to us in the mid-1970s that there was only a weak connection between research on learning and efforts to improve schools and education. With the approval of our Board of Trustees we embarked on a modest effort to help advance understanding of the implications of research on learning - its processes and its findings - for educational planning, policy, and practice.

Since 1975, as part of this effort, we have been running an in-house seminar on learning. The main purpose of the seminar is to educate our staff about what is going on in research on learning and the degree to which the results of that research are being incorporated into educational policies and practices throughout the country. With that information as a base we felt we would be better prepared to develop a modest program of grants and related activities appropriate to the needs of educators and learners.

We have invited various researchers and practitioners to present papers to the seminar on issues related to learning and research about learning. Some of the papers have seemed to us to deserve a wider audience. One such study, which analyzed the