ABSTRACT
Other chapters in these two volumes have presented topics in learning and cognitive instruction from psychological points of view; they have drawn implications from the general literature on learning and teaching; and they have focused on specific content domains, such as reading and mathematics. The advances in our knowledge of these areas are truly impressive. Yet, as we read these and similar accounts of learning and instruction, we should be struck by how issues of affect and of student diversity are missing from the pictures that are drawn (see McLeod, 1988; Secada, 1988a). Such omissions are unfortunate, not only because they represent important forces that are known to have effects on course taking, achievement, careers, and students’ later life opportunities to participate in our society; they are also dangerous because our efforts at educational reform are likely to misfire, because the knowledge base on which those reforms are built will be overly narrow and may be biased against non-White, non-male, and non-middle-class students.
