The reliability and, to a lesser extent, the validity of the newly created Number Sense Test was evaluated with a group of 40 3- to 5-year-old children attending Head Start. Six number sense skills (e.g., counting, number identification, addition-subtraction) and children's feelings about school were assessed both before and after instruction…

Positive long-term effects of phoneme awareness training in kindergarten were found in this study with children of dyslexic parents. Thirty-five at-risk children (attending 26 different classes) participated in an intensive 17-week program in their regular kindergarten classes designed to help them improve in phoneme awareness. Follow-up measures…

Two studies investigated the ability to use contextual information in stories to infer the meanings of novel vocabulary by 9-10-year-olds with good and poor reading comprehension. Across studies, children with poor reading comprehension were impaired when the processing demands of the task were greatest. In Study 2, working memory capacity was…

This study examined the effect of 3rd-grade language arts instruction on growth in children's reading comprehension skills and the degree to which the impact of instruction depended on the language and reading skills children brought to the classroom. Classrooms were observed in the fall, winter, and spring, and language arts activities were coded…

This study examines different pathways of maternal influence on the value that preadolescents attribute to mathematics and German language as domains of education. On the basis of data from 355 students and their mothers, the author tested effects of mothers' education, general parenting practices, leisure pursuits, joint activities with their…

In this prospective, longitudinal study, the authors examined the relations among parental behaviors, parental expectations, and children's academic achievement. Participants were 187 low-income children and their mothers, studied from birth of the child through 3rd grade. Mothers' quality of instruction prior to school entry had significant…

The author explored the mathematics efficacy beliefs of 270 South Asian (Indo Canadian) immigrant and Anglo Canadian nonimmigrant Grade 7 students. Self-efficacy beliefs strongly predicted mathematics performance for both cultural groups, but there were differences between the 2 groups in the sources of self-efficacy, the predictiveness of the…

The present study examined whether academic motivations, conceptualized from the stance of self-determination theory, fluctuate over time in a homogeneous or heterogeneous fashion during a school transition. Three objectives were pursued: First, motivational trajectories were studied using the conventional, homogeneous approach. Second, the…

According to expectancy-value theories, increasing the utility value of a learning activity should result in higher motivation and better learning. In contrast, self-determination theory posits that the content of the future goals (intrinsic vs. extrinsic) that enhance the utility value of the learning activity needs to be considered as well.…

Hypothetical vignettes were used to examine the effects of teacher pedagogical skill (good vs. poor), interpersonal caring (caring vs. not), and classroom goal structure (performance vs. mastery) on high school students' judgments about the target of blame for cheating (teacher vs. student), the acceptability of cheating, and the likelihood of…

Earlier research has shown that prior knowledge of psychology is positively associated with course achievement. But are these effects attributable to preexisting differences in general ability or aptitude? The authors administered 2 pretests to 353 students early in an introductory psychology course and obtained measures of general student…

The authors report on a cross-linguistic investigation of the reading skills of 6- to 11-year-old children of English (an opaque orthography) and of Dutch (a transparent orthography). Dutch children were relatively more accurate and faster than English children of the same age at reading words and nonwords and also faster to complete phoneme…

The main purpose of the study reported here was to investigate the relative importance of complexity of syllable structure and task differences in measuring phonological awareness in low-literacy adults. This study is a replication of a study with children conducted by S. A. Stahl and B. A. Murray (1994). Results indicated that the complexity of…

The authors investigated the effects of domain knowledge on online reading among younger and older adults. Individuals were randomly assigned to either a domain-relevant (i.e., high-knowledge) or domain-irrelevant (i.e., low-knowledge) training condition. Two days later, participants read target passages on a computer that drew on information…

This study examined the predictive power of self-regulated strategies and test-taking motivation on achievement performances under consequential and non-consequential test conditions. Sixty-two undergraduate students were asked to take two parallel classroom tests: one that counted towards their class grade (consequential) and one that did not…