Prior to the 1986 advertising ban, a study measured the effects of smokeless tobacco advertising on young people. A questionnaire was administered in the spring of 1985 to 133 sixth, eighth, and tenth grade students in rural Georgia. The probability of exposure to smokeless tobacco ads was measured by: (1) the number of hours per week the student…

This study examined the effect of three aspects of the testing context--physical privacy, anonymity, and offers of help from a tester--on children's expectations. Performance of 96 11-year-old boys and girls on a pictorial recall memory task in a simulated test was evaluated. The subjects were divided into eight different groups varying on the…

While evidence exists that a person's peripheral temperature responds to his state of arousal or stress, it also responds to other environmental factors. Wrist temperature has been found to vary with ambient temperature, and to increase during the school day. Before wrist temperature can be established as a valid measure of anxiety, stress, or…

Forty 4th and 5th grade remedial reading students from two schools participated in a study that investigated whether providing remedial readers with information on the value of using a particular strategy would influence their self-efficacy and comprehension. In addition, the study explored the effects of emphasizing the general or the…

A summer math class for gifted girls (grades 5-9) was established and conducted by a female instructor for 3 weeks. The class involved take-home work, puzzles, problem solving, and computer work. Parents and students were satisfied with the enrichment class, but questions remained concerning such an approach's legality, the advisability of…

An attempt was made to replicate findings of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) among nine-year-old Hispanic students in Grade 4. The subjects were from 12 classrooms in four elementary schools with high Hispanic student enrollments. All writing activities took place within the respective classrooms during the morning, and the…

One important finding from recent research on multiplication word problems is that children's performances are strongly affected by the nature of the multiplier (whether it is an integer, decimal larger than 1 or a decimal smaller than 1). On the other hand, the size of the multiplicand has little or no effect on problem difficulty. The aim of the…

The relationships between vocational interests and cognitive skills were explored through a study of the measured interests and thinking skills of 63 eighth-grade students. Verified scores on the ACT Interest Inventory were correlated with logic, insight, divergent-thinking, and creative-thinking test scores as well as with scores on measures of…

The purpose of this paper is to further the cause of clarifying construct interpretations of tests, by proposing that non-metric multidimensional scaling may be more useful than factor analysis or other latent structure models for investigating the internal structure of tests. It also suggests that typical problems associated with scaling…

Developmental differences in summaries of expository texts were examined for fourth and sixth grade students in two experiments. Experiment 1 used texts that had a description content structure whereas Experiment 2 texts had a thesis/evidence content structure. Manipulation of the presence or absence of the topic sentence allowed the examination…

To examine the relationship between spelling and reading using full graphemic cues, a study administered tests of oral reading, verbal IQ, reading comprehension, knowledge of letter-sound correspondences, and spelling achievement to 47 fifth-grade students. In addition, data was collected relative to gender and time spent reading outside the…

Differences in teaching at primary and intermediate grade levels were investigated. Specific attention was given to differences in teacher behaviors, teacher communications, grouping, teacher control, and types of materials. Six primary classrooms and five intermediate classrooms were each observed for four 45-minute observation periods, yielding…

This paper suggests that it may be productive for all teachers to become students of metaphor, as least of their own metaphors. Careful attention of how one describes the world appears to give clues as to how one constructs it. Such constructions can come under scrutiny only when one speaks or writes, and then attends to the language one has used.…

A study investigated the efficacy of using the neurological impress method in peer tutoring during reading instruction. The neurological impress reading method is a unison reading procedure in which the student and teacher or tutor read aloud simultaneously and quickly, with the student placed slightly in front of the teacher so that the teacher's…

A study is in progress (with posttesting planned for April 1989), which examines whether word processing enhances the particular benefits of sentence-combining practice on the reading comprehension and writing fluency of low-achieving intermediate students. Subjects are 80 low-achieving fourth grade students from a Florida school district,…