The term "open education" has often been confused with the concept of open area classrooms, not only among educators and the public, but in research as well. The effects of these two concepts were tested in a study of 56 teachers and their students in fifth- and sixth-grade classes in British Columbia. The results showed classroom types…

This study explored the cultural influences on children's self-reported environmental actions, perceptions, and understandings; investigated the relationships among the behavioral, affective, cognitive, and demographic variables; and developed models of children's responsible environmental behavior (Huang, 2001). The cross-cultural comparison…

This research project developed a teaching model using museums for educational purposes. The research involved educational programs for children 9 to 11 years of age at the David M. Stewart Museum, near Montreal, Quebec, which specializes in the colonial history of Canada and Quebec. The study focused on the nature of museum visits, learning…

With the majority of mothers of school-aged children now in the labor force, there is much concern about the supervision of these children when the parents are at work and school is out. Of particular concern are children in self-care after school, many of whom spend their time in places other than home. This study contrasted sixth-graders in…

A study was conducted to evaluate the level of difficulty of textbooks (French and Sciences) written in French for use with sixth grade students. A cloze test was administered to a sample of sixth grade students in two francophone districts in the province of New Brunswick, Canada, and the Henry readability formula was applied to the same texts.…

This cross-cultural study tests a model of motivation on children's learning. Participating in the study are 805 Chinese students and 740 Canadian students. Students answered survey questions related to their perceptions of parents and teachers as well as their motivation orientations and the perceived level of control in learning; their homeroom…

Items on achievement tests are designed to be equivalent in educational testing situations. That is, the information provided to the student is designed to be the same regardless of the ethnicity of the examinee. As a result, students of equal ability would normally be expected to select the same answer regardless of their ethnicity. However,…

As part of a larger study of developmental deficits in the skills of automaticity of name retrieval, phonological awareness, and memory span and their role in reading disabilities, a study tested 13 average and 14 poor fourth-grade readers for digit and letter naming speed, phonological awareness, and digit span. Among the reading skills assessed…

Two studies examined the effectiveness of the PASS (Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, and Successive cognitive processes) theory of intelligence in predicting reading achievement scores of normally achieving children and distinguishing children with reading disabilities from normally achieving children. The first study dealt with predicting…

A study explored the question of the development of recall for narrative and informative texts. Subjects, 60 5th- 8th-, and 11th-grade students from a rural area of Quebec, representing all levels of achievement, were presented with an informative text and a narrative text. Results indicated that: (1) the narrative text elicited a longer recall…

A cross-cultural experiment testing the effect of personal choice on learning was conducted with fifth and sixth graders from Canada (n=130) and Taiwan (n=153) using a computerized foreign language learning task. The results show that choice had no significant impact on children's interest, effort, or learning outcome. Although comparable to their…

A study identified stages of student writing maturation across several grades and developed classroom resources to enhance the maturation of students. A total of 3,600 essays written by students in grades 4 and 6-12 attending urban and rural schools in eastern Ontario, Canada, were holistically scored. The original limited and quite specific…

A study examined English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) and native English speaking (L1) students' recall of propositional knowledge, story structure elements, inferential comprehension, and the types and frequencies of oral reading miscues. Reading tasks were administered to 30 students (aged 9 to 13) from each of the three linguistic groups…

Thirty grade 4 subjects were individually tested on a digit span test of working memory capacity (Case and Kurland) and the Reading Span Test (Daneman and Carpenter). The Reading Span Test was administered using sentences at a grade 2, grade 4, and grade 6 reading level. It was predicted that, as the decoding demands of the stimulus sentences in…

This study examined bias in children's perceptions of the similarities between themselves and others. Participants included 346 fourth and fifth graders, and their teachers, from 5 schools. Students rated same-sex classmates on a 4-point scale that assessed how similar or different the subjects felt their classmates were. Several days later,…