Free time is the natural medium through which youngsters express themselves and develop motor, cognitive, and social skills. Nevertheless, free play on the playground is rarely used in the school as a means of enhancing students' motivation to learn. This study uses play as an application of Premack's principle (D. Premack, 1965) to the classroom.…

This paper presents preliminary information from the first part of a long-term study of curriculum development in a sixth grade classroom in Hawaii. It describes: (1) the teaching practices implemented; and (2) the literacy attitudes and habits that developed within this environment. A ten-year veteran teacher with teaching experience across the…

Student participation during and subsequent to an ethnographic study of peer collaboration in a primary classroom is explored through a long-term investigation. The original study was designed to study patterns of collaboration using a variety of techniques including interviews with the children, first seen in a split grade one and grade two…

Arguing that the development of a notion of sense-making is of critical importance to improving science learning, this paper examines science teaching in four Boston (Massachusetts)-area classrooms that participated in an experiment on ways of integrating technology into a sixth-grade science curriculum on the earth's seasons. The task of the…

To provide a differentiated language arts program to meet the needs of highly able and gifted readers and to encourage interest in reading and the development of state reading goals, students in the sixth grade of a middle school in Maryland were grouped by ability for their language arts/reading classes. Students were exposed to a wide variety of…

Some pre-instructional misconceptions held by children can persist through scientific instruction and resist changes. Identifying these misconceptions would be beneficial for science instruction. In this preliminary study, scores on a 60-item true-false test of knowledge and misconceptions about earthquakes were compared with previous interview…

Focusing on the effects of three interventions on students' reading and writing of persuasive discourse, a study investigated (1) whether the writing of persuasive discourse can be improved by instruction, and (2) the effect of reading on writing and of writing on reading within the persuasive mode. Subjects, 100 Canadian sixth graders stratified…

This study analyzed data from statewide criterion referenced competency tests (CRCTs), used to determine whether a child is retained in grade, investigating whether trends and differences in scores across Georgia for students from similar family backgrounds could be linked to failing this test twice in elementary school. The study explored whether…

This paper reports on five related studies on upper elementary school students' beliefs about the role of real-world knowledge in solving mathematical word problems, and on possibilities of overcoming their unrealistic mathematical modeling. Findings from the first study of 75 Belgian fifth-grade students showed that as a consequence of current…

Why do some adolescents cheat and others do not? To answer this question, the relationship between motivational factors and self-reported cheating beliefs and behaviors was examined in a sample of early adolescents. It was hypothesized that cheating and beliefs in the acceptability of cheating would be more likely to occur when students perceived…

Recent studies have documented a decline in academic performance and motivation as students move from elementary to middle level schools. This paper expands these studies in three ways: (1) by examining the classroom-level differences among middle school students' motivation to see if motivational constructs vary by classroom; (2) by exploring the…

A study in Finland investigated the relationship of two general aspects of student motivation for second language learning (preference for challenge and curiosity) and motivation specific to the learning situation. Subjects were 292 sixth-graders and 301 eighth-graders, who performed two open and two closed English vocabulary tasks in two…

This study of metacognition and motivation explored variations over time in the relationships between children's metacognitions about their study activities and various components of motivation for achievement. The study attempted to: (1) identify possible causal relations between metacognitive and motivational variables by looking at their…

This poster presentation examined the structure of Japanese elementary school children's social support systems to demonstrate how they are related to: (1) academic achievement; (2) teacher evaluations; and (3) the children's own sense of self-esteem. A total of 91 fifth and sixth graders, along with their teachers, were interviewed and surveyed.…

This study was conducted to compare upper elementary school children's attitudes toward physical activity, by grade level and gender across six attitude scale subdomains in order to assist physical education teachers in planning programs designed to foster positive attitudes toward physical activity. Subjects (N=429) were 243 girls and 186 boys in…