High stakes testing is a given in many public school districts in the United States. This paper reports the chilling effect high stakes testing had on the pedagogy of one teacher. The study took place in a large Midwestern urban district where a university consultant observed a fifth-grade classroom. This researcher was able to observe and…

For one instructor, years of working with children in the art classroom suggested that talking with children is necessary and vital to understanding how they learn artistically and how to teach them. This paper focuses specifically on children's talk about their art in relation to the children's view that their world is separate and distinct from…

This paper presents a structured group intervention for increasing social justice awareness, knowledge, and advocacy skills with upper elementary, middle school, or junior high aged students. The paper presents the "Empowering Students for Social Justice" model and describes a general framework that includes goals and activities for an…

A study was conducted in order to determine the specific classroom qualities and characteristics that promote and motivate students to develop attitudes and behaviors conducive to civic participation. One classroom is a bi-lingual sixth grade, located in an older neighborhood school in a coastal southern California city and the other is a…

This study was a secondary analysis of data collected by staff of the Program for Complex Instruction (PCI). The purpose of the larger study was to investigate the effect on learning gains of having students know the content and performance standards on which they will be judged as well as the effect of using evaluation criteria. This study looks…

This study examined the reading habits of 301 fourth-grade pupils in Israel. The objective was to investigate the relationship between the type of school library and the pupils' reading habits over the long range. The hypothesis was that pupils who have a central library in their school together with classroom collections read more than pupils…

Two studies involving 448 sixth graders and 329 college undergraduates investigated the categorization of students' correct and incorrect responses to domain-specific analogy problems. Cross-study results provided support for the response categories proposed by P. Alexander (1990) and their hierarchical structure. (SLD)

This paper discusses a cognitive model of how action agendas and goals emerge through the dynamics of self-organization in collaborative activities. While machines are designed to perform a function, or goal, humans are self-organizing systems that set their own goals and produce order without having external order imposed on them, or, more…

A year-long naturalistic case study investigated teacher-initiated change efforts in language arts by examining the experiences and influences of a single sixth-grade teacher. The teacher was observed in multiple contexts (both in and out of her school), interacting with varying groups of individuals, not all of which were located within the…

This research, proposing that the teacher is the pivotal component between the student receiving a mediocre science education or a dynamic science education, was designed to observe and to analyze the science teaching strategies and methods of recognized, exemplary, fifth-grade teachers. Six teachers from six different public schools in two…

This study considered the effects of gender and cognitive processing capacity on achievement of students at an intermediate school. The capacity test developed by J. M. Furukawa (1970, 1977), which requires examinees to recall word pairs immediately after a brief exposure, was modified for use with these students. The test was adopted because it…

In a survey of 247 parents of gifted students in a pull-out program designed for academically gifted students in grades four through six in Midland, Texas, parents were asked how they participated in the program and how they viewed the importance of being involved in various aspects of their child's special education. Among the results, the survey…

Two experiments investigated the effects of sources of strategy information on children's acquisition and transfer of reading outcomes and strategy use. Children with reading skill deficiencies received comprehension instruction on main ideas. In the first experiment, the final sample comprised 33 students (21 fourth graders, 12 fifth gaders)…

Poor readers and reading age level controls performed a primed picture naming task and a lexical decision task. Additionally, vocabulary performance was assessed for both groups. Subjects were 42 Dutch children--mean age for the poor readers was 145 months and for controls was 117 months. In the picture naming task there were three priming…

Defining better implicit models of children's actions in a series of situations is of paramount importance to understanding how knowledge is constructed. The objective of this study was to analyze the implicit mental models used by children in complex change problems to understand the stability of the models and their evolution with the child's…