Many middle school students claim that their voices are ignored in the classroom, where the attitude is too often that the teacher holds the one right answer. Instead of this approach, teachers may wish to use the Socratic Seminar, which prompts students to examine issues and ideas through dialogue and actively involves and motivates them, giving…

Children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) experience pragmatic language deficits, but it is not known whether these difficulties are primarily associated with high levels of inattention, hyperactivity, or both. We investigated pragmatic aspects of communication and language comprehension in relation to poor attention and/or…

In the present study, the relationship between students with and without learning disabilities (LD) and different aspects of test anxiety was examined on a new multidimensional measure of test anxiety. A sample of 774 elementary and secondary school students--195 students with LD and 579 students not identified with LD--completed the "Test Anxiety…

Joint attention, a foundational nonverbal social-communicative milestone that fails to develop naturally in autism, was promoted for three toddlers with early-identified autism through a parent-mediated, developmentally grounded, researcher-guided intervention model. A multiple baseline design compared child performance across four phases of…

Parents' goal orientations in parent-child reminiscing were examined in this study, where 28 preschoolers (mean age = 46 months) experienced a standardized event. Dyads discussed the event that evening, with parents randomly assigned to either an "outcome-oriented" or a "process-oriented" condition. Outcome-oriented parents, who were told that…

This paper attempted to offer a theoretical framework on the action of Orienters on initiating attentional processes. (Author/RK)

Examines the retention of a lecture by college students. Emphasis is on note taking procedures, information density and speech rate. Retention was measured 48 hours after lecture and was found to be superior when note taking was separated from listening and speech was at normal rate. (Author/DEP)

Investigation supported by Research Grant HD-01396 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Habituation and dishabituation to a simple geometric stimulus were examined for a sample of 36 5-month old subjects. All subjects viewed successive presentations of a standard stimulus, and, following a retention interval, a single presentation of the standard and a novel stimulus in the test phase. During the interpolated interval, repeated…

Results indicated men in poor metabolic control obtained lower scores on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) Information and Vocabulary subtests than did a demographically matched group in good metabolic control. Men in poor control evidenced disrupted attention on a simple reaction time measure. Results suggest that poor metabolic…

Findings indicated no differences between 17 learning disabled and 32 normal elementary students on attention tasks, no difference in sustained attention, and no evidence of a developmental lag. A significant difference in attention was found favoring special classes over regular, small groups over large, and teacher-directed over independent…

Five of six learning disabled students (aged eight to 11) demonstrated greater attention span toward classroom tasks on days of a running program than on nonrunning days. Further, three Ss evidenced more impulse control on running days, and as a whole, Ss demonstrated less disruptive behavior on running days. (CL)

Reviews the literature in an attempt to show the effects of inattention upon reading achievement. (RB)