GRADES OR AGES: Grades 6-12. SUBJECT MATTER: French language, literature, and civilization. ORGANIZATION AND PHYSICAL APPEARANCE: The guide is divided into seven sections, one for each grade. Each section is in list form. It is mimeographed and spiral bound with a paper cover. OBJECTIVES AND ACTIVITIES: Each section lists several general…

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 New Jersey Minimum Basic Skills (MBS) Tests in reading and mathematics were administered for the third consecutive year during the week of March 24, 1980 to approximately 390,000 publicly educated students in grades 3, 6, 9, and 11. The 1979-80 MBS Tests measured the same skills as the 1977-78 and 1978-79 tests. These three tests remained…

Introduction: This research sought to investigate how school students build on their existing knowledge of a curriculum topic and transform found information into personal knowledge, and how their knowledge of this topic changes. Method: The qualitative study involved 574 students from Grades 6 to 12 in ten New Jersey schools. The context for data…

A study was conducted to determine whether (1) readers would express an awareness of structural disruption in stories, (2) there were developmental differences in the extent to which readers were aware of structural disruption, and (3) there were developmental differences in the types of structural disruptions that disturbed readers. Fifty third…

A three-way design was used to assess the effect of imagery instructions in noun-pair learning. The three principal factors were instructions (imagery versus rehearsal versus control), presentation mode (words versus pictures), and grade (1, 3, 6, and 11). Sixty subjects were drawn from each grade and randomly assigned to the six conditions.…

Examines the effect of contrived instructional texts and naturally occurring texts (content area textbooks) on students' main idea comprehension. Concludes that students taught to identify the main idea using only contrived texts, such as basal skills lessons, will have difficulty transferring their main idea skills to naturally occurring texts.…

The contribution of nonfamily adults to young people's well-being was explored using both a cross-sectional national sample of 614 12- to 17-year-olds and a longitudinal sample of 370 students followed from 6th-8th grades through 10th-12th grades. Both variable- and person-centered analyses were employed. Young people's involvement in…

The tension between providing opportunities for mathematical understandings and the need to teach widely-used notations and algorithms is explained in terms of a folk pedagogical conflict. Divergent pedagogical practices are shown to follow from different mental and epistemological assumptions and manifest themselves in equally divergent student…

GRADES OR AGES: Grades 5-12. SUBJECT MATTER: Smoking. ORGANIZATION AND PHYSICAL APPEARANCE: The guide has three major parts--1) an outline of basic facts; 2) resource guide on smoking and its relationship to health and disease, with sample lesson plans and vocabulary; and 3) appendix, including questionnaires, selected key facts on smoking, a…

Describes the Analytic Writing Exchange (AWE) as a cooperative endeavor by teachers who teach students to score writing papers and provide opportunities for students to exchange and grade papers written by their peers in cooperating schools. Claims students in the program become better writers and score better on state tests.(NH)

A study of elementary and secondary schools in Montana addressed the relationship between school size and student scores concerning the individual and society, e.g., fitness, citizenship, careers, and environmental issues. Although few correlations were significant, the majority of the results indicated that smaller schools received higher scores…

Reports on a study of adolescents that probes the relationship between the attitudes of grade 6 students toward their school subjects, adult occupations and their actual course of study five years later. Findings indicate there is almost no connection between these attitudes and their course of study in grade 11. Discusses other findings. (KW)

To evaluate the writing skills of Colorado students under the Educational Quality Act of 1985 (commonly known as the 2 + 2 project), a study administered writing tasks to a statewide sample of third, sixth, ninth, and eleventh grade students in the spring of 1987. A narrative or story-telling writing task was administered to 2,000 grade 3 students…

The Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) results of 81 West Virginia home-schooled children in grades 3, 6, 9, and 11 were analyzed. Means of each sub-section of these CTBS scores were analyzed for significant differences from the West Virginia public school means for the respective grades and subsections. Families of the children tested…