Children's sense of relatedness is vital to their academic motivation from 3rd to 6th grade. Children's reports of relatedness predicted change in classroom engagement over the school year and contributed over and above the effects of perceived control. Analyses revealed that relatedness to parents, teachers, and peers each uniquely related to…

Reports a cross-sectional investigation of the link between community violence exposure and academic difficulties for 237 urban elementary school children. Analyses indicated that community violence exposure was associated with poor academic performance. These relations appear to be mediated by symptoms of depression and disruptive behavior.…

Studies whether Latin or French as a foreign curricular language is a better preparation for learning Spanish. Participants who had learned French at school made markedly fewer grammar errors and slightly fewer vocabulary errors in the Spanish test that participants who had learned Latin. Concludes that knowledge of Latin is probably not an…

Reports on two studies examining procrastination and its relation to several key components of self-regulated learning using self-report surveys. Results indicate that procrastination was related to college students' self-efficacy and work-avoidant goal orientation and, to a lesser extent, their use of metacognitive strategies. (Contains 54…

Assesses the effectiveness of a short metacognitive intervention combined with algorithmic cognitive instruction in an elementary school setting. Children in the metacognitive program achieved significant gains in trained metacognitive skills, and performed better on trained cognitive skills compared with the other conditions. (Contains 44…

Metacognitive monitoring affects regulation of study, and this affects overall learning. The authors created differences in monitoring accuracy by instructing participants to generate a list of 5 keywords that captured the essence of each text. Accuracy was greater for a group that wrote keywords after a delay than for a group that wrote keywords…

Surveys primary grade teachers about their instructional adaptations for weaker writers. Although many teachers were sensitive to struggling writers' individual needs, there was a sizable percentage of teachers (42%) who made few or no adaptations. The most common adaptations made by teachers addressed students' difficulties with the mechanics of…

Assesses the effects of explicitly teaching for transfer by broadening the categories by which students group problems requiring the same solution methods and prompting students to search novel problems for these broad categories. This transfer treatment was combined with instruction on solution methods. Improvement on immediate- and near-transfer…

Assesses the contribution of self-regulated learning strategies (SRL), when combined with problem-solving transfer instruction, on 3rd-graders' mathematical problem solving. SRL incorporated goal setting and self-evaluation. Contrasts the effectiveness of transfer plus SRL to the transfer treatment alone and to teacher-designed instruction. SRL…

Tests an adaptation to case-based learning that facilitates abstracting problem-solving schemas from examples and using them to solve further problems: analogical encoding, or learning by drawing a comparison across examples. In 3 studies, the authors examined schema abstraction and transfer among novices learning negotiation strategies. (Contains…

Models of question asking predict that questions are asked when comprehenders experience cognitive disequilibrium, which is triggered by contradictions, anomalies, obstacles, salient contrasts, and uncertainty. Study results reveal that deep comprehenders did not ask more questions, but did generate a higher proportion of good questions about…

Background: Transactional models of coping (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) can contribute to our understanding of why some children cope effectively with bullying while others suffer negative outcomes. However, previous research has relied on coping measures that are not comparable with adult measures, restricting investigation of developmental trends.…

Background: Research reveals that explicit reading strategies instruction and engaging students in interaction about texts promote students' reading comprehension ability. The present intervention study combines both aspects. Aims: The study examines the educational benefits of explicit reading strategies instruction, followed by practice in (a)…

Background: A previous study (Stuart, 1999) showed that early phoneme awareness and phonics teaching improved reading and spelling ability in inner-city schoolchildren in Key Stage 1, most of whom were learning English as a second language. Aims: The present study, a follow-up of these children at the end of Key Stage 1, addresses four main…

Neuroscience is a relatively new discipline encompassing neurology, psychology and biology. It has made great strides in the last 100 years, during which many aspects of the physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology and structure of the vertebrate brain have been understood. Understanding of some of the basic perceptual, cognitive, attentional,…