The research deals a problem of primary pupils' preconceptions about a child prenatal development. Even the pupils cannot experience the phenomenon and can get only mediate information; their idea about the prenatal development is quite well constructed. The quality of the preconceptions depends mainly upon variety of informational sources kept at…

This action research paper depicts the teacher-developed instructional strategies to enhance vocabulary instruction among school-age students in the public school setting. The selected population spans across three school districts and includes a third grade classroom, a fifth grade classroom, as well as a select fourth and fifth grade students…

Textbooks play a central role in Taiwanese education. In the wake of the political reform and social protest movements of the 1970s and 1980s that led to Taiwanese educational reform, critics assert that traditional textbooks reinforce the dominant national Chinese cultural identity without considering the specific perspectives and voices of…

This document sets forth the design of a test of reading comprehension. The exam requires students to read passages of written English text--either literary or informational--and to answer questions about what they have read. In some cases, the questions deal with facts in the text or vocabulary. In other cases, a complete answer requires a clear…

Euro-American 2nd- and 4th-grade children (Ms=7.67 and 9.82 years) heard stories about Black and White characters who produced artwork yielding a windfall reward. Children allocated rewards to characters, justified their allocations, and judged the fairness of patterns representing different justice principles. Older children allocated more money…

This is a compilation of reports on international literacy research. The report includes 3 separate reports on France, United Kingdom and Brazil. In the first report, research correspondent Jacques Fijalkow presents research into variations of reading motivation related to students' socioeconomic status (SES), age, and gender. Three of these…

Scholars such as L. Calkins (1993), D. H. Graves (1978, 1984, 1990, 1994), and R. Routman (1991, 1996) hypothesized that teachers must be confident, avid readers and writers to be effective reading and writing teachers. Three questions guided a case study that examined this hypothesis among 4 fourth-grade teachers nominated as exemplary reading…

This technical report explores the extent of potential bias introduced into the U.S. Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) through nonresponse on the part of schools. Data from the third cycle of TIMSS, conducted in April-June, 2003, are the basis for the analyses. The analyses compare selected characteristics likely to…

The goal of the current research was to assess whether children can make strategic use of morphological relations among words to spell. French-speaking children in Grade 4 spelled three word types: (a) phonological words that had regular phoneme-grapheme correspondences, (b) morphological words that had silent consonant endings for which a…

Purpose: The aim of this study is to investigate teachers' attitudes towards medicines and to determine what they are willing to teach children about medicines. This study is part of a larger project where medicine education materials accessible on the internet (www.uku.filaakekasvatus, in Finnish with English introduction) were designed,…

Our action research project report provided students with social skills training to effectively handle bullying situations in the fourth grade. Our study involved 70 fourth-grade students and began Monday, January 14, 2008 and concluded Friday, May 2, 2008. The behaviors documented from the fourth grade students were name calling, exclusion,…

In this paper we analyze the impact of classroom peers on individual student performance with a unique longitudinal data set covering all Florida public school students in grades 3-10 over a five-year period. Unlike many previous data sets used to study peer effects in education, our data set allow us to identify each member of a given student's…

This review has been prepared by the Australian Council for Educational research (ACER) under an Agreement with the Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST). It is one component of a project to investigate effective third wave intervention strategies for students and learning difficulties that persist beyond the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how 23 fourth-grade students with different writing abilities translated their teacher's literacy instruction into an understanding of audience awareness when writing for Internet publication. As part of their classroom literacy instruction, students learned the textual features indicative of different…

Research on traditional classrooms paints a picture of teachers controlling talk patterns and of students producing minimal amounts of mainly procedural talk, recitation-type talk, or both. Often this bleak state of affairs is attributed to teachers' overreliance on inauthentic display questions--questions that impose tight thematic control and…