Although research has clearly established that low family income has negative impacts on children's cognitive skills and social-emotional competence, less often is a family's experience of material hardship considered. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 (N=21,255), this study examined dual components of…

A large proportion of the UK adult population has very poor literacy and/or numeracy skills (see the 1999 Moser Report, the 2003 "Skills for Life" Survey and the 2006 Leitch report). In 1999, the Moser report found that approximately 20% of adults in England had severe literacy difficulties, whilst around 40% had some numeracy problems.…

Maxima was an intervention project that focused on assisting teachers to establish more inquiry-based, gender-inclusive, and culturally relevant learning environments. The authors grounded the project by using sociotransformative constructivism as a theoretical framework to steer the implementation of three guiding concepts for professional…

We report a study of repairs in communication between workers and visiting outsiders (students, researchers or teachers). We show how cultural models such as metaphors and mathematical models facilitated explanations and repair work in inquiry and pedagogical dialogues. We extend previous theorisations of metaphor by Black; Lakoff and Johnson;…

The literature suggests that teacher morale is at an all time low in Australia (Hicks 2003, Smyth 2001) with teachers feeling undervalued, frustrated, unappreciated and demoralized (Smyth 2001; Senate Employment, Education and Training References Committee (SEETRC) 1998). In this paper the author utilizes the data gathered in a recent study into…

This study applied the Theory of Reasoned Action and the Technology Acceptance Model to measure outcomes of general education courses (GECs) under the University of Botswana Computer and Information Skills (CIS) program. An exploratory model was validated for responses from 298 students. The results suggest that resources currently committed to…

In this article, Victoria-Maria MacDonald, John M. Botti, and Lisa Hoffman Clark trace the evolution of higher educational opportunities for Latinos in the United States from the Higher Education Act of 1965 to the designation of Title V in the Act's 1998 reauthorization. The authors argue that this evolution moved through stages, including…

This article develops the concept of "second generation" e-learning as a new paradigm for thinking about online learning. Whereas "first generation" approaches have been effective for developing technical skills, the same approach has not proven effective for developing management soft-skills (e.g., in the field of leadership education). The…

Elementary and middle school children were given a large battery of tests evaluating reading subskills and reading-related cognitive abilities. These measures were used to define latent representing skills and abilities believed to be important components of reading comprehension. Hypothesized relationships among these constructs were specified…

This article discusses the use of propensity scoring in experimental program evaluations to estimate impacts for subgroups defined by program features and participants' program experiences. The authors discuss estimation issues and provide specification tests. They also discuss the use of an overlooked data collection design--obtaining predictions…

Demonstrates that Alan Purves's "Elements of Writing about a Literary Work" can be used to generate insights into literature. (DD)

A model is proposed in which stereotypes are assumed to function as schemas that serve to organize and structure information. The thesis is advanced that sex stereotyping is a normal cognitive process and is best examined in terms of information-processing constructs. (Author/RH)

This article discusses content schemata, formal schemata, and the newly-hypothesized abstract discourse schemata, asserting that empirical studies confirm that abstract schemata are more powerful owing to their greater generality than formal schemata, which in turn are superior to content schemata. (118 references) (MDM)

High-stakes accountability policies such as the federal No Child Left Behind legislation require districts and schools to use data to measure progress toward standards. In doing so, such policies assume that practitioners can and will use data to enhance decisionmaking and improve teaching and learning. However, educators use and make sense of…

After a brief review of integrative small group learning models that have appeared in the educational psychology literature, this article then looks into the group dynamics literature and describes one of that field's most well-documented findings: that interactions among group members change somewhat predictably over time. How theorists from…