The study investigated reasons why 11th-grade students decided not to enroll in a vocational curriculum and who influenced their decision. The population studied was all nonvocational 11th-grade students in the Southwest Ohio Region Personnel Development Center during the 1987-88 school year. Five schools were randomly selected from the…

Two instructional programs with differing emphases on linking to existing knowledge and experience were used to present elementary dynamics to physics (N=67). Effects on aspects of cognitive structure and performance were investigated. Propositions elicited by a modified word-association technique were used to assess linking in cognitive structure…

Students in eleventh grade composition classes in an Ephrata, Washington, high school work in groups to evaluate each other's papers, enabling teachers to handle many more papers in much less time than usual and developing students' writing and evaluatory skills. The sequence used for each course assignment is as follows: (1) The class reads and…

A need existed for instruments to measure status isomorphs for either income or political influence in the process of status attainment. To provide a base on which to build further work, instruments were developed in this project by which to measure youth's aspirations for and their significant others' expectations for the youth's future levels of…

A recognition paradigm was employed to assess developmental changes in memory for within-sentence (premise) and between-sentence (inference) information from 16 brief prose stories. Eleventh graders retained significant amounts of both premise and inference information, while fifth graders showed substantial retention only for premise information.…

The purpose of this study was to determine what, or part of what, makes academic success probable or improbable for a student. The core research question was, Which practices, characteristics, and circumstances of students, families, schools, school districts, and communities tend to give Maine students a higher probability of meeting state…

Reading is invisible. Any report of another's reading (beyond the level of word recognition) must rely on some kind of reproduction of the actual experience; there is no way to tap into the experience itself. After completing a pilot study, a small number of adolescents--5 eighth graders and 5 eleventh graders read the first four chapters of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the potential role of peer influences in contributing to the relative underachievement of girls in mathematics. Upper middle class, suburban New Jersey students (n=172 in grades 5, 8, and 11) were asked to express their attitudes toward hypothetical peers displaying strong interests and abilities in…

Self-regulation refers to the degree that individuals become metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active in their own learning processes. One potentially helpful means of examining students' self-regulation is to analyze their internal representations, or scripts, for recurring academic tasks. For this study, researchers analyzed the…

This study is part of a larger study on the problems that high school students' have in the interpretation and production of drawings and graphic representations in practical work in the biology laboratory, specifically with the use of the microscope. This part of the study focuses on classroom discourse among students and teacher as they use the…

A problem that arises when a differential item functioning (DIF) study is done with samples of examinees differing in ability is examined. A test may function differently when the populations from which the items are calibrated are not of equal ability. Since the lower ability examinees get many difficult items incorrect, the spread (standard…

Recent social studies research has been lacking in qualitative examinations of life in secondary social studies classrooms. Although there have been a number of suggestions as to how instruction in high school classrooms should proceed, it is rare to find a detailed description of how students actually are taught in such classrooms. This study was…

This report is from a study designed to determine: (1) the extent to which specific instructional media, technologies, and strategies are used in teaching U.S. history; (2) titles and types of resources found to be effective in teaching U.S. history; and (3) the extent to which history teachers are involved in cooperative activities with school…

Using a recursive network transition model for depicting stories to generate two stories of contrasting structure (successive episodes organized by topic and embedded episodes organized by failed and successful goals), a study examined the understanding of the structures by having children in the third through eleventh grades rate each story…

The purpose of this study was to explore how the needs, actions, and beliefs of teacher and students interact with the constraints of the classroom and the curriculum to establish an atmosphere conducive to effective learning of physics in grade 11. An interpretive research methodology was used to investigate the students' and teachers' needs,…