Examines whether stereotypes can threaten in private settings. Results revealed that minority students performed worse than same-gender students in both public and private environments. Finding supports the concept of threatening intellectual environments and shows how far reaching the effects of stereotypes can be. Discusses these findings in…

Students learned about electric motors by asking questions and receiving answers from an on-screen pedagogical agent named Dr. Phyz who stood next to an on-screen drawing of an electric motor. Results are consistent with a cognitive theory of multimedia learning and yield principles for the design of interactive multimedia learning environments.…

Examines predictors of teachers' ratings of academic competence of 105 kindergarten children from low-income families. Controlling for children's skills and socioeconomic status, teachers rated children as less competent when they perceived value differences with parents. The findings suggest a mechanism by which some children from low-income…

Self- and collective-efficacy beliefs were examined as main determinants of teachers' job satisfaction. Analyses corroborated a conceptual model in which individual and collective-efficacy beliefs represent, respectively, the distal and proximal determinants of teachers' job satisfaction. The perceptions that teachers have of other constituencies'…

Examines the hypothesis that some people are verbal learners and some people are visual learners. Presented a battery of 14 cognitive measures related to the visualizer-verbalizer dimension to 95 college students and then conducted correlational and factor analyses. Results have implications for how to conceptualize and measure individual…

Literacy, language, and cognitive skills were compared for 35 4th-5th graders with early-identified reading disabilities (RD), 31 with late-identified RD (first seen after 3rd grade), and 95 normally achieving students. Late-identified reading deficits were heterogeneous; some children were weak in both comprehension and word-level processing,…

Uses an extant data set to model the relationship between growth in decoding skill and growth in rapid automatized naming (RAN) in 1st-grade children. Results indicated a unique relationship between RAN numbers and early decoding skill. A bidirectional relationship between decoding skill and RAN numbers was supported. (Contains 39 references, 8…

A meta-analytic review of group comparison design studies evaluating peer-assisted learning (PAL) interventions with elementary school students produced positive effect sizes (ESs) indicating increases in achievement. PAL interventions were most effective with younger, urban, low-income, and minority students. Interventions that used…

Examines U.S. and Chinese conceptions of learning with leaning-related terms collected from U.S. and Chinese college students. Cluster analysis yielded a hierarchical structure of this lexicon for each culture. The English terms included elaborated conceptions of mental processes, internal learner characteristics, and social contexts. Most Chinese…

Examines the extent that nonpromotion to 1st grade can be predicted from information about school and family contexts. Parental school involvement, parental estimates of children's school adjustment, and parental satisfaction with school programs were predictive of risk for nonpromotion. Head Start children were less likely to be retained in…

A secondary analysis of the National Assessment of Educational Progress was conducted to provide insight into ethnic differences in 12th-grade math achievement. Variables central to the three conditions model of achievement accounted for 45%-50% of the variance. The implications of these results for theories of ethnic differences and for reform…

In 2 experiments, college students read a historical passage on aspects of human intelligence. Students were randomly assigned to 2 different instructional conditions to process the passage, mnemonic and free study. Mnemonic participants remembered more names and contributions than did free-study participants. Findings illustrate that mnemonic…

Using difficult materials, the authors attempted to improve college students' self-regulation by allowing extended study time before taking a test. The authors also examined whether background knowledge and note-taking strategies would be positively related to self-regulation. Results imply that test performance is more related to note taking and…

Using self-determination theory, the authors tested a motivational model to explain the conditions under which rural students formulate their intentions to persist in, versus drop out of, high school. Analyses showed that the provision of autonomy support within classrooms predicted students' self-determined motivation and perceived competence.…

Knowledge construction and scientific reasoning were examined during a unit in genetics, in which anomalies were used as a catalyst for student learning. Students used genetics simulation software to develop hypotheses and run tests of fruit fly crosses to develop mental models of simple dominance trait transmission. Instruction was intended to…