The professional practices concerning children's questions in the welfare clinic, the day care center, the school and the library in Finland are discussed in this paper. Each institution's historical background and the implicit and explicit concepts of children affecting professional behavior are analyzed. The research data include legal and…

This paper reports on a 2-year research study at the University of Southampton (England) regarding teachers' and students' beliefs, understandings, and classroom practices with respect to explicit language awareness in three secondary schools. Specifically, the study sought to document the understandings of secondary English and foreign language…

Many current efforts to develop large-scale science assessments involve hands-on tasks because of their presumed power to elicit and measure scientific reasoning skills. An analysis of the processes in which students engage while responding to such assessment is needed in order to discover the specific forms of reasoning that tasks elicit. This…

The conference recorded in this document covered a wide variety of themes and consisted of keynote addresses, research presentations, and workshops. The following keynote addresses are included: "Technician Training: A New Zealand Perspective" (Wood); and "The Provision of Information Services in Vocational Education: The Present…

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (1991) has identified the use of computers as a necessary teaching tool for enhancing mathematical discourse in schools. One possible vehicle of technological change in mathematics classrooms is the Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), an artificially intelligent computer-based tutor. This paper…

Insights into successful collaborative writing interactions were derived from an analysis of the discourse of three ninth-grade coauthoring triads (groups of three students)--a model group, a typical group, and a problem group. The writing task was an argumentative essay. Students received instruction in collaborative writing through teacher…

A study of the effectiveness of a language proficiency testing method using partial dictation is reported. The study used 60 undergraduate students at a Mexican university studying English as a second language under a traditional four-skills approach. The partial dictation exam was a combination of dictation and cloze procedure. The entire text is…

Since an author does not provide all critical information, a text is never fully explicit; it demands that the reader/listener supply missing elements in order to form a coherent and logical whole. A study was conducted to explore both the types of responses urban first grade students made when asked to predict a narrative ending and differences…

The existence, before any formal physics instruction, of schemata which lead to an idiosyncratic interpretation of real world events, which physicists see as exemplifying principles of physics, is now well established. Because these interpretations are often at variance with physicists' interpretations, they have been labeled, among others,…

A study measured both short- and long-term effects of an educational workshop designed for teachers in the Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben-Gurion, Israel. Participants were 60 volunteer faculty members who were randomly assigned to one of eight multidisciplinary groups for the 4-day workshop, which aimed at improving teachers' instructional…

Latent trait measurement theory was used to investigate the measurement characteristics of both parts of a multiple-choice measure of field-independence, the Finding Embedded Figures Test (FEFT). Analysis was based on data provided by 1,528 students enrolled in one of two middle schools located in the southern United States. Of the subjects, 731…

This research explored cognitive-motivational patterns of learning-disabled and nondisabled adolescents by employing the theoretical model of C. S. Dweck, which posits that a "learning goal" orients students toward the development of competence, whereas a "performance goal" orients students toward the documentation of competence, and that these…

Abstracts and abstractors' critiques of ten published articles related to curriculum, misconception research, and instruction are presented. Aspects addressed in the studies include: (1) Canadian teachers' opinions on changes in elementary and junior high school science programs; (2) current status of ecology education in Illinois; (3)…

The study compared perceptions of high school and college faculty regarding the characteristics and preparatory needs of secondary learning disabled (LD) students. The analysis was based on a survey of 288 high school teachers (246 regular and 42 special education) and 82 college teachers. Separate factor analyses identified three academic factors…

A study was conducted to describe conceptions of the usefulness of reading (the function or "why" of reading) and conceptions of the reading process (the form or "how" of reading) among preschool and first grade children in Sweden. The research paradigm used--based on the work of Vygotsky and Piaget--was called the "second…