Focusing on the culture of students with disabilities allows teachers to add another real-world dimension to the multi-cultural atmosphere of their classrooms. While Public Law 94-142 (the Education for All Handicapped Children Act) legislates what opportunities must exist for the differently able, volunteer program such as "Kids on the…

Passages used in the Illinois Goal Assessment Program (IGAP) reading test are intact pieces of literature, stories, and essays that match classroom reading assignments and typical student reading experiences. There are 15 testlets, each containing 5 items, associated with each passage. Each testlet requires students to demonstrate various levels…

The relationship between self-regulation, using measures from the affective and cognitive domains, and academic performance was investigated for 62 middle-school (grade 6) students. Key aspects of self-regulated learning studied were planning and self-assessment. A range of affective variables, including self-concept and locus of control, was also…

A study was conducted to test the hypothesis that metaphorical thought develops according to the principles governing other categorizing processes. Of particular interest were the questions of whether preschool children possess the categorical flexibility to comprehend metaphorical statements and, if they do, whether this flexibility manifests…

The development of a powerful learning environment aiming at the acquisition and transfer of general thinking skills through learning to program in LOGO was studied. The following conditions were sought: (1) sufficient knowledge of the LOGO primitives and concepts; (2) mastery of the thinking skills within the programming context; and (3) explicit…

It is argued in this paper that a truly holistic approach to school empowerment would legitimize the student as a stakeholder in the educational process. The initial field testing of two developmentally based student feedback mechanisms is described. Focus groups were used with sixth-grade students to assess the "goodness of fit" between…

A previous study of the perceived social realism of television series featuring families was both replicated and extended with a sample of 1692 second, sixth, and tenth graders in 42 schools in southern California. The "Viewing Frequency" instrument and the "Realism" instrument took children 10-15 minutes to complete. Content…

Student achievement test scores were compared and equated, using three different testing methods: paper-administered, computer-administered, and computerized adaptive testing. The tests were developed from third and sixth grade mathematics item banks of the California Assessment Program. The paper and the computer-administered tests were identical…

The educational television series "Across Cultures" was evaluated to examine the effectiveness of the series and how the programs were structured to attain objectives. Designed to complement sixth- and seventh-grade social studies textbooks, the series on world cultures is composed of thirteen 15-minute programs about three widely…

The Alcohol Misuse Prevention Study (AMPS) presented an alcohol education program to fifth and sixth grade students based on social learning theory. The AMPS program introduced students to the concept of social pressure (especially peer pressure) to misuse alcohol and to strategies to effectively counter such pressure. The program was evaluated in…

To examine the role of phonetic code in memory, a study investigated the use of phonetic recoding strategies in fifth and sixth graders identified as good and poor readers. Subjects--120 students with IQ scores in the average range--were divided evenly between both grades. Thirty subjects from each grade who scored above the 50th percentile on the…

A research project was conducted to see if students given direct instruction in recognizing and asking literal, interpretive, and critical questions would ask better questions about material they read than students who were not given the same instruction. This premise, based on an extensive search of the literature on questioning and…

Temperament and objective and subjective measures of academic competence were interrelated in order to test two alternative models: (1) a direct effects model stressing intraorganismic, noncontextually mediated links; and (2) a developmental contextual model emphasizing social interactional processes between students and teachers. Data from the…

In response to the tradition of examining a new test's validity by comparing it with a well-established multiple-choice test, a study investigated whether multiple-choice tests with one right answer can measure the reading comprehension process as defined by constructivists. The study compared the information obtained from two different…

Examined were relationships between metamemory and strategic behavior in 130 impulsive and reflective children in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. Of these, 77 had been tested 3 years earlier on multiple metamemory and memory tasks. At pretraining, children were assessed on metamemory, cognitive tempo, summarization skills, and teacher ratings of…