Twenty-seven Louisiana participants in the Middle School Teachers Enhancement Project (MSTEP) were surveyed about the use of the Texas Instruments Math Explorer calculator. An assessment was made to determine the teachers' own existing knowledge of how to use the calculator and guide a program for calculator skill development. Of the 28 total…

A study investigated the effect of training Dutch students to learn to derive word meanings from written context. Subjects, 64 grade 6 primary school children, were randomly divided into control and experimental groups. The experimental group followed eight lessons in their mothertongue (Dutch), while the control group followed their regular…

This paper is based on efforts to bring change to school mathematics by trying to develop mathematics classroom communities in predominantly minority classrooms. In these communities, students work towards doing mathematics by working on open-ended, investigative situations; sharing ideas and strategies; and jointly negotiating meanings. Students…

Based on the social cognitive perspective which assumes that children and teenagers internalize social values, this study focused on the psychological processes involved in the internalization of responsibility by young adolescents. The study examined whether preadolescents experienced social goals, ethical evaluations, and perceptions of efficacy…

The American public continues to be perplexed by the substandard reading, math, and science skills of students. Science information alone is growing at a rate that will make it very difficult for many, especially students with feeble science knowledge and skills, to become scientifically literate. This research describes the development,…

This study is part of a longitudinal study of 22 elementary school children observed over a 3-year time span in the classroom and in individual task-based interviews. Through the examination of videotaped structured clinical interviews of Marcia, the first in 1992 when she was 9 years old (4th-grade), this study seeks to draw inferences about her…

Children at high risk for problematic behaviors and emotional problems seem to show limited internal boundaries to control their direction and attention and violation of the boundaries of others. This study addressed the relative impact of a coping skills curriculum on locus of control in 4th-grade high risk students. Fourth grade students (N=96)…

Students at grades four and five were administered a writing assessment that was developed to correspond to the California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) writing tasks at grade four. Teachers were trained to score the CLAS-like tasks according to the rubric developed by the State for CLAS. In addition, 164 students at three schools in the…

This study examined the effects of the second level (intermediate acoustical processing of rhyming words) and the third level (deep-semantic processing of words in sentences) of the "levels of processing" framework on memory performance of four types of intermediate-grade students (52 "normal" students, 50 students with…

In recent years, society has emphasized the desirability of being thin. Although children may learn the attractiveness of being thin from society, another influential component may be their parents' attitudes toward food, eating, and eating restraint. This study investigated the dieting practices and beliefs in fourth-grade children and their…

This paper challenges the assumption that meaning is in some way magically encoded within texts and argues that questions, when they are used simply as tools to lead readers to a single meaning, are inadequate as a means of reading comprehension assessment. The paper then goes on to describe one of a series of micro case studies that explored…

A study examined how students use their prior knowledge and experience to help them understand a text, and how that influences what they recall from the text. Subjects, 46 sixth graders from 3 elementary schools in Nashville, Tennessee, were tape recorded as they thought aloud while reading either a passage on "sugar" or a passage on…

Jill Paton Walsh's "The Green Book," the story of a group of humans and their life on a new planet, captures the imagination of learners and provides a compelling context for learning. Several groups of learners including fifth graders and adult teacher practitioners responded to the book in unique and interesting ways. As the setting,…

This study investigated whether music could be used as a tool to motivate students with emotional disturbances to develop positive attitudes toward writing and whether these attitudes would result in a higher volume of writing output and improved writing skills. The research focused on two fourth-grade male students. The data collection instrument…

This paper presents nine sets of books which focus on specific contemporary international issues, and which have been used successfully with upper elementary grade students. The paper shows how the books (including picture books), which include subjects such as the preservation of the environment, world peace, endangered animals, and the coming of…