Parents and educators have expressed fears that high noise levels in open space schools may interfere with academic achievement. This investigation compared the reading comprehension of 60 fourth grade students in an open space school during periods both of quiet and of naturally occurring background noise. The reading tasks resembled normal…

Research on an interpretation technique (IT) for using the Pupil Item Response Record (PIRR) of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) to actively involve students in their test interpretation was presented. The major concern of the study was to determine whether the IT had any impact on attitudes toward or knowledge about the ITBS. Students in…

A study was conducted to determine whether interjudge reliabilities on assignments of comprehension questions to the Barrett Taxonomy categories could be attained and whether the taxonomy could be used as a criterion to assess varying levels of reading comprehension questions in various reading textbooks. A total of 623 questions from three fourth…

A study investigated the separate and combined effects of the syntactic organization of the sentence, the contextual framework in which a message is embedded, and the readers' past experiences on children's inferential reading comprehension of pragmatic cause/effect statements. The subjects, 144 fourth grade students, were asked to specify the…

Forty first-grade children and 40 fourth-grade children participated in a study that sought to determine if age-related increases in memory for prose are due, in part, to deliberate mnemonic strategies and if older children use the higher-order relations in prose more efficiently than do younger children. Each child listened to a tape-recorded…

A study was undertaken to investigate the relationship between 38 teachers' perceptions of students' oral communication apprehension, and 776 fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students' self-reports of communication apprehension. The teachers listed the four most apprehensive and the four least apprehensive students in their classrooms, then…

The purpose of this study was to determine differences in word recognition strategies used by good and poor readers. Twenty good readers and twenty poor readers were randomly selected from a fourth grade class and randomly assigned to levels of a five by five repeated-measures Latin Square design. All of the subjects were given two tasks to…

To determine the multivariate relationships of measures of convergent thinking, divergent thinking, and self-concept with reading achievement was the purpose of this study. Measures of verbal divergent thinking and self-concept were administered to 188 fourth and sixth grade students from an urban, lower middle class elementary school. Reading…

The purpose of this study was to develop a foundation for reliable and effective measurement of significant parameters in the development of written language skills in school age children. The subjects for the study were 25 nine-year-old children, 12 boys and 13 girls, who were randomly selected from among 1,559 participants. The findings…

This study examines the effectiveness of Reciprocal Teaching during social studies instruction in fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade inclusive classrooms (N=128) in a rural school system in New Mexico. Reciprocal teaching is a method of scaffolded instruction that has been demonstrated to improve reading comprehension in students of various ability…

This paper describes an intergenerational science program called Sisters in Science which fosters girls' interest and achievement in science. The program is designed to encourage and prepare girls and women for careers in math, science, and technology. A group of fourth grade girls from 19 classrooms across 6 elementary schools met once a week…

Aspects of reading motivation and the amount and breadth of reading done were studied with 105 fourth and fifth graders. Children's reading was found to be multidimensional, and their motivation predicted reading amount and breadth even when previous amount and breadth were controlled. Intrinsic motivation was a better predictor than extrinsic…

A study investigated the effects of interactive CD-ROM software on children's reading comprehension. It explored whether 31 fourth-grade children in an elementary school in a suburban school district in the Midwest comprehended narratives better when reading from the printed page or from the same text displayed by the computer. One class read each…

This study examines the historical understanding of 22 fourth-graders and 11 fifth-grade students in two classrooms in a suburban community near Cincinnati (Ohio). The classes were homogeneous racially, with no students of Hispanic, African-American, Asian, or Pacific Island descent in either class. The school reflects primarily middle and…

This study examines the ability of students to develop empathy for peoples of the past and to avoid the belief that people in the past were no different than today. The paper reports the results of a year-long qualitative investigation of fourth and fifth graders' attempts to understand the values, attitudes, and beliefs of people in the past. The…