A sample of 12 recent and older sixth grade social studies textbooks was examined to determine their level of explicitness, one of the criteria used to determine the "friendliness" or comprehensibility of a text. Researchers randomly selected three samples--usually chapters--from each of the 12 textbooks. The Explication Inventory…

Recently, research has begun to identify the social cognitive dysfunctions that aggressive children display. Using noninteractive laboratory tasks, aggressive children were found to perceive more hostile intentions from others in ambiguous situations than did nonaggressive children. Research has not investigated if this bias occurs in truly…

A new readability formula is designed to work on passages that are 40 to 99 words long, while existing readability formulas require a passage of 300 words or longer. The new formula requires the passage to have at least three sentences and is reliable for the fourth through the twelfth grades. (Four figures which demonstrate the use of the formula…

A replication study was conducted with five underachieving fourth graders to determine the effects of teacher-written praise notes and associated parent praise as motivating agents for increased performance of assigned school tasks. When Ss completed 80% or more of their work they were given a praise note to take home to parents who were…

Strategies used by 15 fifth and sixth grade students to comprehend written problem solving tasks were identified. A naturalistic protocol analysis procedure was used to gather and analyze students' verbal and written responses to 55 selected reading and thinking tasks. In the ten tasks selected for detailed analysis, students demonstrated marked…

A study examined the relationship between television viewing and reading behavior within a sample of 198 fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students: specifically, whether the amount and specific content of television being viewed affected reading achievement and leisure reading patterns. Intelligence and reading achievement scores of each participant…

Eighty-one fourth grade students were administered tests, tasks, and observations to investigate the relationship between IQ, rates of learning, scores on standardized achievement tests, and results of classroom observation. There was a substantial relationship between IQ, standardized tests, and rates of learning, but not classroom observation.…

The term "open education" has often been confused with the concept of open area classrooms, not only among educators and the public, but in research as well. The effects of these two concepts were tested in a study of 56 teachers and their students in fifth- and sixth-grade classes in British Columbia. The results showed classroom types…

A study extended word association methodology beyond isolated word stimuli to investigate the effects of written context on the meanings that proficient readers impart to words. A repeated-measures design was used to assess the responses of 62 sixth grade readers to target words at three levels: no context, limited context, and expanded context.…

This study examined the efficacy of teacher judgment in the process of setting mastery scores (cut scores) for fourth-grade mathematics in local school districts in Nebraska in terms of agreement between teacher classification of students and classification by the cut score obtained by this classification. The study also examined cut scores in…

Dull classroom environments, poor students' attitudes and inhibited conceptual development led to the creation of an innovative mathematics program, the Class Banking System (CBS), which enables teachers to use constructivist ideas and approaches. To assess the effectiveness of the CBS, actual and preferred versions of the Individualized Classroom…

The objective of this study was to investigate how two application lessons at the end of an earth science curriculum contributed to two different types of classroom: generative and authoritative. This study used Vygotsky's views to interpret earth science learning in the elementary classroom. The research questions were: How do fifth grade…

In the early 1990s good readers in low-achieving countries saw reading mostly as a difficult, effortful process while those in high-achieving countries saw reading more as a pleasant, imaginative activity: for them reading was first and foremost enjoyable. This paper attempts to elucidate this concept of reading as enjoyment and tries to determine…

Since the mid-1980s there has been an increasing chorus of calls for professors to reimmerse themselves in the rigors and realities of teaching in a K-12 classroom setting. This paper reports on the rewards and risks its two author/educators encountered in their K-12 classroom teaching reimmersions. One author voluntarily initiated a year-long…

The use of mind mapping (MM), a visual tool developed by T. Buzan (1983; 1996) to improve note-taking, foster creativity, organize thinking, and develop ideas and concepts, was studied in a sixth-grade classroom with 16 students as an instructional and learning tool. In MM, a central focus or graphic representation of the problem is placed in the…