Study with first grade teachers and students explored the impact of book-rich classroom environments and home rereading on reading motivation, comprehension, and fluency. Results showed enhanced comprehension for book-rich classrooms, both with and without a home component; home rereading increased reading motivation and promoted parental…

Effects of Spanish immersion on fourth, fifth, and sixth grade children's native English vocabulary were studied. Findings support the idea that Spanish immersion has English-language benefits and that positive transfer occurs from Spanish as a foreign language to native English receptive vocabulary. (Author/MKA)

Measures of phonological processing, speech perception, and Chinese character recognition were administered to Hong Kong Chinese three and four year-olds. A model predicting phonological awareness from vocabulary, short-term memory, and speech perception was supported. Both phonological awareness and letter naming predicted unique variance in…

Investigates the development of phonetic awareness, and insight into the structure and function of Chinese characters that give a clue to pronunciation. Participants were 113 Chinese second, fourth, and sixth graders enrolled in a working-class Beijing, China elementary school. Results show that both character familiarity and character regularity…

Examines the impact of early heritage-language education and second-language education on heritage-language and second-language development among Inuit, White, and mixed-heritage kindergarten children. Inuit children in second-language classes showed heritage language skills equal to or better than mixed-heritage children and Whites educated in…

Investigates concreteness as a text feature that engaged undergraduate readers' comprehension, interest, and learning in four text types: persuasion, exposition, literary stories, and narratives. Results show that concrete texts were recalled better than abstract texts, although the magnitude of the advantage varied across text types. Concreteness…

Examines how transmission and transaction beliefs about reading affect comprehension, engagement, and holistic understanding of narrative texts with undergraduate college students (N=247). Transaction beliefs were related positively to the type and number of reader responses as well as to the sophistication of one's holistic interpretation.…

Compares two approaches for improving instructional text with a sample of eighth grade students (N=64). The first approach emphasized the reduction of the reader's comprehension; the other was oriented toward triggering causal inferences in the reader. Only the second procedure produced benefits on inferential learning, though both procedures had…

Discusses two studies that explored whether adding music and/or sounds to multimedia instructional messages would improve the quality of college students' retention and transfer. Groups receiving both music and sounds performed worse than groups with neither. Students receiving sound only performed worse than groups not receiving sound.…

Inexperienced trade apprentices were presented with text in a visual-only manner and in both auditory and visual forms. Results show that the diagram-only presentation was the least intelligible, but after two specifically designed training sessions the advantage of the visual diagram-auditory text method disappeared. In a second study, the…

Compares cognitive-motivational and demographic characteristics of students enrolled in web-based sections of Psychological Statistics with counterparts in conventional sections of the course. No demographic differences were found, however, cyberstudents exhibited a greater external locus of control. Measures of on-line course activity, a high…

German elementary students, their teachers, and their parents responded to questionnaires concerning perceptions of mathematics ability, gender stereotypes in mathematical talent, and future expectations. Gender stereotypes held by parents interacted with the gender of the child, predicted parents' beliefs about their child's abilities, and…

Investigates gender differences in confidence judgments when they were correct and incorrect on exam items with postsecondary students (N=551) in five countries. Large and significant differences were found in overall confidence, confidence when correct, and confidence when wrong, associated primarily with country and culture. In contrast, gender…

Examines students' ability to predict and postdict test performance in a classroom context. Undergraduate students (N=96) participated during a semester-length course. Results show that the high-performing students were accurate, with accuracy improving over multiple exams. Low-performing students showed moderate prediction accuracy but good…

Explores the heuristic value of a typological approach for preventing and studying school dropout. Empirically builds a typology of dropouts based on individual school experiences, tests the typology's reliability by replicating the classification with two different longitudinal samples, and examines the typology's predictive and discriminant…