The artifacts (instructional games) created by a class of fourth-grade students engaged in designing educational games are analyzed. To facilitate the analysis, these artifacts were compared with products created by students in a similar design context who were creating instructional software. In both situations, inner-city fourth graders were…

An important and well-documented finding in the peer relations literature is that there is an association between children's peer relations and their later social development. Two models have been proposed for the predictive link between early peer relations and later adjustment: incidental and causal. Although findings have supported an…

Researchers on the Lasting Benefits Study (LBS) are tracking students who participated in Tennessee's K-3 Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) Project (1985-89) as they continue into later grades. Project STAR was a statewide experiment conducted to demonstrate the effects of reduced student/teacher ratios (15:1) on student achievement…

This study examined the effects of specially designed thinking journal activities that have been attributed with encouraging reflective thinking, on instruction using generic, or content-free, problem solving software. Sixty-three fourth grade students participated in four instructional sessions using the software package called "Moptown Hotel."…

A pilot hunger awareness program was developed for fourth graders in a low-income elementary school. Objectives were to provide students with information that would increase their awareness of hunger in their communities by helping them identify signs of hunger, food pantries located within their school zip code area, and a resource person in…

This paper explores the effects of infusing writing-to-learn strategies into an inquiry-oriented science unit on simple machines, inventions and inventors. This study used an intact group pretest and posttest design to capture the ecological validity of a classroom of grade 4 students and teacher. The design incorporated quantitative research…

This article examines selected interactive behaviors and messages currently being communicated in the home and attempts to answer the question: To what extent does a child's response to social and moral incidents resemble or match the parent's response to the same situations? A set of episodes depicting social incidents involving children and…

A total of 68 second- and fourth-graders participated in a study of children's expressiveness and encoding and decoding skills. They were chosen on the basis of their parents' self-reports of low or high expressiveness on the Family Expressiveness Questionnaire. In hour-long, videotaped interviews with their mothers, subjects sorted 25 cards…

To determine whether training could counter deleterious effects of reward on intrinsic motivation and creativity, 68 students in grades 3, 4, and 5 at a parochial school in Massachusetts were assigned to one of four conditions in which intrinsic motivation training and rewards were either provided or withheld. In the intrinsic motivation training…

The purpose of this study was to determine an optimal schedule for the frequency and spacing of drill and practice in the learning of verbal information. Subjects for the first phase were 62 fourth, fifth, and sixth graders in a public elementary school. Using a computer-based drill involving the naming of the capitals of the 50 states of the…

A study involving 14 regular classroom student science teachers assigned to Grades 3, 4, and 5 and the public school students in each of the classes was undertaken to assess the relationship between student achievement and teacher performance ratings. The student teachers were all female and were seniors in a four-year undergraduate teacher…

An abuse prevention program was presented in five elementary schools by an organization called Working to Eliminate Child Abuse and Neglect (WE CAN). Subjects (N=612) were elementary school students in grades four and five. The prevention program included the film "No More Secrets," question and answer sessions, role plays, and opportunities for…

The purpose of this study was to compare the relative merits of two causal models in which moral reasoning, sex, and social class were used to predict classroom behavior problems. Model A implied that conduct problems would decline linearly as moral maturity increased. Model B implied that the lowest as well as the highest levels of moral maturity…

This study examined help-seeking and achievement behavior in elementary shool girls in a problem-solving situation. Classified as high or low in mastery orientation on the basis of their scores on a subset of items on the Intellectual Achievement Responsibility Scale, 40 fourth and sixth grade girls participated in the study. Children's task…

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…