This guidance report focuses on the teaching of mathematics to pupils in Key Stages 2 and 3. It is not intended to provide a comprehensive guide to mathematics teaching. We have made recommendations where there are research findings that schools can use to make a significant difference to pupils' learning, and have focused on the questions that…

Production and judgment tasks were used to investigate five- through eight-year-old children's metalinguistic awareness of pragmatic rules concerning direct and indirect requests for action and information. Results showed several effects for age of child and for type of request. (Author/RH)

The influences of locus of control, awareness of control and metacognition on the use and transfer of a trained strategy were examined. Specifically, it was hypothesized that internal locus of control would be associated with more strategic performance, and that those children who were able to both accurately assess their performance with and…

An ecological method was used to assess the patterns of goal-directed behaviors of eight children with autism and eight chronological and mental age comparable children with Down syndrome. Analysis of quantitative and qualitative behavior coding indicated that children with autism exhibited shorter and less overlapping goal-directed behaviors,…

A self-paced free recall task was employed to assess the effects of motivational and metacognitive influences on active processing and recall. A total of 81 fourth-graders were randomly assigned to one of four instructional conditions: strategy instructions plus process monitoring instructions; strategy instructions only; process monitoring…

Investigates children's ability to distinguish the literal meaning of a message and a speaker's communicative intent. Either knowing or not knowing the speaker's intended referent, first- and second-grade children evaluated brief referential communication messages for ambiguity. In the first experiment, messages were written on cards and read to…

First and second graders were exposed to a memory task in which their recall performance varied as a function of their incidentally elicited sorting behavior. When asked what had affected their recall, only some children at each grade identified sorting as a causal factor. Causal attributions predicted use of sorting strategy in a standard…

The study compared the effectiveness of providing elementary students with learning disabilities with either (1) instruction in both story structure and self-questioning techniques or (2) just training in story structure identification. The combined self-questioning and story structure group demonstrated the greatest gains in reading…

Presents study results examining conditions in which children can apply a previously learned memorization strategy to new but analogous tasks. Concludes that strategy mastery during training is not sufficient. Reports that only subjects who use information about relations between procedures and results to construct generalizable knowledge are able…

This study examined the effects of teaching prelingually deaf, elementary school children specific strategies to use when reading. Strategies addressed the skills of inferring, predicting, analyzing, attending, associating, synthesizing, and monitoring. Five of six children made significant gains in both reading levels and specific metacognitive…

This study investigated the tendency of deaf children (ages 6-13) not to spontaneously use active memory strategies such as rehearsal. Comparison of 38 deaf and 39 hearing students found that deaf students compensated for less effective rehearsal strategies by capitalizing on unique spatial features of the task. (Author/DB)

To learn about teachers' conceptualization of memory strategy use, memory knowledge, and developmental changes in these skills, investigators administered a questionnaire to 59 teachers of children in kindergarten through sixth grades. The questionnaire included sections on strategy use, metamemory skills, and memory monitoring and control…

Examines the relationships between metamemory and strategic behavior in impulsive and reflective children. Children in three experimental groups received (1) prose summarization instructions; (2) summarization instructions in conjunction with meta-cognitive training about the importance of a reflective approach to learning; or (3) no instructions.…

This brief review of how computers are currently being used and studied in the schools stresses ways in which computers will be used to enhance learning and development, and the need for research on computer learning to consider the multi-functional uses of computers in various contexts, instead of seeing it as a medium with a single effect on…

Studied the influence of intelligence, self-concept, and causal attributions on metamemory and the metamemory-memory behavior relationship in elementary school children. Results indicated that intelligence had an impact on metamemory in all age groups; and that metamemory remains an important predictor of memory behavior. (Author/RWB)