Assesses children's structural understanding of combinatorial problems when presented in a variety of task situations. Provides an explanatory model of students' combinatorial understandings that informs teaching and assessment. Addresses several components of children's structural understanding of elementary combinatorial problems. (Contains 50…

Describes two hours in the life of an eight-year-old to demonstrate that children acquire information and develop language skills from multiple sources. Argues that the conceptualization of literacy must be broadened from reading and writing skills to a definition that recognizes the layering of information and that includes all forms of the…

Two studies with a total of 110 children (grades three through five) with high or average verbal intelligence examined their theory of mind through ratings of their understanding of interrelationships between and among mental activities and verbs. Analysis indicated very similar organization and structure of these concepts in both groups of…

Investigates whether a well-defined coaching process used at the moment of anger will help students internalize the cognitive processes learned in counseling sessions and enable them to use the anger management strategies independent of coaching. Offers school counselors reasons to implement such a model as an adjunct to individual or small group…

Describes the success, the methods (mental, informal written, standard algorithm) and the strategies of informal written arithmetic to be observed when 300 elementary students worked on six addition and six subtraction problems with three-digit numbers. (Author/MM)

Applies Blumer's theory of symbolic interactionism to explore how normal children make meaning of their decision making world, both of their own acts and the labyrinthine world adults structure for them. Schema/narratives on friendship, sports, adults, and school reveal knowledge making strategies defined by immediate experiences and a capacity to…

Assesses two aspects of the validity of verbal reports in children's subtraction: reactivity and veridicality. Results reveal that students were able to able to provide veridical strategy reports, and that the instruction to verbally report had few effects on task performance. Informal findings indicate that students had less difficulty reporting…

Explores issues arising from the long-standing theoretical and empirical attention to reading as a specifiable set of psychological processes, and the consequences of this attention for parents' and educators' deliberations and practices. Concludes that theories of reading need to deal fundamentally with the practices that learners, teachers and…

This exploratory study, a one group pretest-posttest design, investigated the development of elementary preservice teachers' understandings of distribution as expressed in the measures and representations used to compare data distributions. During a semester-long mathematics methods course, participants worked in small groups on two statistical…

Understanding the ideas of chaos theory and spectra of teachers' beliefs about literacy provides an additional method of examining, organizing, and interpreting the complex research findings in the area of literacy teachers' thought processes. Historically, research paradigms in the area of teacher thought processes have ranged from the…

This study sought to determine whether categorizing information would increase students' ability to recall that information. Two recall tests, consisting of a list of 30 words in random order and a list of the same 30 words grouped into 6 categories, was developed and administered to 2 groups of 16 fourth- and fifth-grade students enrolled in a…

A study explored an application of rauding theory to the developmental components that contribute to elementary-age children's reading comprehension. The relationships among cognitive power, auditory accuracy level, pronunciation (word recognition) level, rauding (comprehension) accuracy level, rauding rate (reading rate) level, and rauding…

As part of an attempt to precisely clarify the role of social context in early literacy development, this paper presents a working theoretical model for the ways in which one form of close social relationship, friendship, relates to early school-based literacy. The paper defines friendship as a dyadic, mutual relationship. The paper suggests that…

Story length and plausibility were varied to see whether these factors significantly affect children's ability to monitor their comprehension. A total of 19 third graders and 25 sixth graders were individually read four stories in a counterbalanced order. Each story had one of the following sets of characteristics: long, low plausibility; short,…