Offers sociometric analysis of the central office staff of an urban school district with respect to their knowledge of and attitudes toward school-based innovations. Results show personnel had no clear understanding of what innovation is or of the complexity inherent in implementation processes. Lack of leadership, overreliance on external…

In one experiment, second and fourth graders used more categorical information when they made inferences than did preschoolers. In two other experiments, second graders, but not preschoolers, distinguished between categorical information and appearance when they made inferences about known concepts and familiar properties. (BC)

The comprehensibility, interestingness, familiarity, and memorability of concrete and abstract instructional texts were studied in 4 experiments involving 221 college students. Results indicate that concreteness (ease of imagery) is the variable overwhelmingly most related to comprehensibility and recall. Dual coding theory and schema theory are…

Comparison of performance in 3 practical problem-solving tasks by eighth graders in Singapore (170 boys, 107 girls matched for aptitude, attitude, and prior knowledge) indicated that girls distinctly preferred content familiarity and outperformed boys in several processes/skills when familiar with content. (SK)

Observed 12-month olds, with their mothers and independently, acting on objects from home and objects brought by the experimenter as new exemplars of previous toys. Found that conventional actions were more frequent in joint than in independent activity. In independent activity, conventional actions were more frequent with customary than with…

Two experiments tested predictions of dual-route-cascaded and triangle frameworks regarding effect among first-graders of having a word in oral vocabulary prior to reading that same word. Results suggest that word-specific phonological information is represented in the reading system independently of semantic or articulatory influences. Results…

Establishes a suitable composite index which combines speed and accuracy in the measurement of decoding skill. Examines whether speed acts as a confounding factor in the measurement of decoding ability. Sees whether familiarity with the word acts as a confounding factor in the assessment of spelling skills. Indicates that including word-naming…

Examined effect of familiarization on 3.5-month-olds' retention of visual stimuli with varying delay times. Found support for retention models in which direction of attentional preferences (novel, familiar, or null) depends on memory accessibility. Short lookers showed better retention over time than long lookers, indicating that much of the…

Background: People are better at recognizing faces of their own race than faces of another race. Such race specificity may be due to differential expertise in the two races. Method: In order to find out whether this other-race effect develops as early as face-recognition skills or whether it is a long-term effect of acquired expertise, we tested…

During the first year of life, infants' perception of speech becomes tuned to the phonology of the native language, as revealed in laboratory discrimination and categorization tasks using syllable stimuli. However, the implications of these results for the development of the early vocabulary remain controversial, with some results suggesting that…

Negative priming refers to slowed down reactions when the distractor on one trial becomes the target on the next. Following two popular accounts, the effect might be due either to inhibitory processes associated with the frontal cortex, or to an ambiguity in the retrieval of episodic information. We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to…

This article reports on an exploratory investigation of the relationship between prior experience of formal instrumental music tuition (FIMT) and the process of collaborative computer-based music composition. The study linked a school in the UK with a school in Norway to engage in computer-mediated collaborative composition via e-mail.…

Charter schools must abide by federal special education laws and regulations because they are part of the public education system. However, the way this gets carried out in practice differs widely due to many factors, the most important of which are a charter school's "legal identity" and its "linkage" to a traditional LEA for…

Based on the closeness of kinship relationships, a 4-layer household-based convoy is proposed for the study of intergenerational support exchanges. It first separates co-residing family members from non-coresiding family members with whom they have frequent contact and places them in the innermost and next-innermost circles of an individual's…

What does it take to become effective teachers of students of culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and racially diverse backgrounds? Based on research with teachers over the past several years, this paper discusses what it means to teach students of diverse backgrounds with heart, courage and conviction, and the implications of their practice…