This article examines the topicality of Library and Information Science (LIS) dissertations written between 1930 and 2009 at schools with American Library Association (ALA)--accredited university programs in North America. Dissertation titles and abstracts were examined for the presence of library-related keywords drawn from the core curricula of…

Spatial mental representations can be derived from linguistic and non-linguistic sources of information. This study tested whether these representations could be formed from statistical linguistic frequencies of city names, and to what extent participants differed in their performance when they estimated spatial locations from language or maps. In…

This study examined the theoretical controversy on the impact of syllables and bigrams in handwriting production. French children and adults wrote words on a digitizer so that we could collect data on the local, online processing of handwriting production. The words differed in the position of the lowest frequency bigram. In one condition, it…

Syriac translations and Syriac scholars played an important role in the transmission of the sciences, including the mathematical sciences, from the Greek to the Arabic world. Relatively little, unfortunately, remains of the translations and original mathematical works of earlier Syriac scholars, but some materials have survived, and further…

Infants are adept at tracking statistical regularities to identify word boundaries in pause-free speech. However, researchers have questioned the relevance of statistical learning mechanisms to language acquisition, since previous studies have used simplified artificial languages that ignore the variability of real language input. The experiments…

The term "recursion" is used in at least four distinct theoretical senses within cognitive science. Some of these senses in turn relate to the different levels of analysis described by David Marr some 20 years ago; namely, the underlying competence capacity (the "computational" level), the performance operations used in real-time processing (the…

Accurate teacher evaluations of student performance are crucial for effective teaching. This study examined whether students' immigration and language background affect teachers' evaluations. Multilevel analyses tested whether teachers overestimate the performance of immigrant relative to that of non-immigrant students. As part of the German PISA…

In our work in teacher education and professional development, we aim to help teachers to learn to participate in, and create, classroom ecologies that support students' learning. In this article we focus on the challenges of developing a classroom ecology that provides mathematical sustenance for students. We pay particular attention to the ways…

In discussion-oriented classrooms, students create mathematical ideas through conversations that reflect growing collective knowledge. Linguistic forms known as indexicals assist in the analysis of this collective, negotiated understanding. Indexical words and phrases create meaning through reference to the physical, verbal and ideational context.…

This chapter is about culture and mathematics teaching and learning. The authors' goal is to offer a thoughtful treatment of the role of culture in the teaching and learning of mathematics and to synthesize literature that is relevant to this concern from multiple subdisciplines in education, including math education, educational anthropology,…

Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very reliably observed in the data, but to date it escaped satisfactory theoretical explanation. This article suggests that Zipf's law may result from a hierarchical organization…

This study analyzes the procedural explanations written by remedial college mathematics students. Relevant literatures suggest that six communication activities might be key in effective procedural explanations in mathematics writing: (a) orienting the learner, (b) providing kernels or definitions of concepts and procedures, (c) using exemplars or…

Much has been written to convince content-area teachers to include literacy instruction as part of their regular content instruction. The purpose of this study was to determine how the messages available in the literature are framed and how they might be viewed by content-area teachers, especially mathematics teachers. The analysis revealed that…

This article presents a Vygotsky-inspired analysis of how a teacher mediated a "thinking aloud" whole-group discussion in a 6th grade mathematics classroom. This discussion centered on finding patterns in a triangular array of consecutive numbers as a phase towards building recursive and direct algebraic formulas. By a "thinking aloud" discussion…

This study examined whether singular/plural marking in a language helps children learn the meanings of the words "one," "two," and "three." First, CHILDES data in English, Russian (which marks singular/plural), and Japanese (which does not) were compared for frequency, variability, and contexts of number-word use. Then young children in the USA,…