Home and school literacy contexts were connected in a study that involved parents of 28 inner-city primary school children in developmentally appropriate and culturally sensitive literacy activities. Pretest and posttest data determined achievement and motivation differences favoring children in the family program over the 28 comparisons not…

About 200 undergraduate classes were evaluated in three consecutive terms with surveys that assessed grades and course workloads. Major features of the covariance structure model developed were that courses giving higher grades were better liked and that courses giving higher grades had lighter workloads, showing effects of instructors' grading…

Reanalysis of the factor analysis of S. Simpson, B. Licht, R. Wagner, and S. Stader (1996) of children's responses to four ability-related self-perceptions shows how applying a construct validity approach leads to conclusions opposed to theirs but still consistent with previous theory and research on academic self-concept. (SLD)

H. Marsh and A. Yeung have criticized the conclusions of the present authors with regard to academic self-concept as inconsistent with previous research. It is argued that this inconsistency is because items on the academic self-concept scales are not adequate for answering questions about children's differentiation of perceived ability and…

The effects of dictation and explicit instruction in planning on the composing skills of 42 fifth, sixth, and seventh graders with learning disabilities were studied. The combination of dictation and instruction in advanced planning resulted in more complete and qualitatively better essays than those written by comparison students. (SLD)

The role of executive control in the revising difficulties of 12 fifth and sixth graders with writing and learning problems was studied. Procedural support made revising easier for participating students, but their difficulties were not due solely to difficulties with executive control. Implications for instruction are discussed. (SLD)

The effects of an author, writing in the first person, on adolescents reading history textbooks were studied with six high school sophomores. Data from think-aloud protocols and semi-structured interviews show that students interacted with the "visible" author and engaged in mental conversations. (SLD)

Three experiments, involving 197 undergraduates, studied the information that is included in a topic overview accessed during reading. The presence of topic, but not order, information resulted in faster topic sentence reading times. Information about global passage structure was also encoded from the overview. (SLD)

Whether word-reading processes operated similarly in 72 adult literacy students and 72 elementary school students matched for reading level was studied. The same orthographic and phonological processes appear to govern in both, but correlations between word reading and spelling were weaker for adults. (SLD)

Forty-two below-average readers (ages 7 to 10 years) were given single-word training, phrase training, or no training. Trained children in either condition learned to decode target words quickly and accurately using flashcards, and had better comprehension than untrained children. (SLD)

The hypothesis that gains in reading performance occurring among dyslexic children during individually paced reading are partially attributable to changes in short-term memory processing was tested with 23 elementary school students. Findings provide support for a causal role for short-term memory functioning in text processing. (SLD)

Developmental changes in the expression of superordinates in children's word definitions were studied with 96 elementary school students. Superordination increased significantly and changed qualitatively with age, although across grades children produced more superordinates for nouns than for adjectives or verbs. (SLD)

Social and metacognitive contributors to gender differences in mathematics strategy use by first graders were studied with 58 children. Girls were more likely to use overt strategies, and boys were more likely to use retrieval (from memory) to solve addition and subtraction problems. (SLD)

Motivational influences on help-seeking behavior in mathematics were studied with 203 seventh and eighth graders. Perceived benefits and threats were important influences on avoidance of help-seeking behavior, but only benefits predicted adaptive help seeking. Social competence had an indirect effect on avoidance of help seeking. (SLD)

College students (n=349) completed an argument evaluation test in which they evaluated arguments about real-life situations. Argument quality and strength of prior beliefs were used to create an index of differences that were reliably linked to differences in cognitive ability and actively open-minded thinking. (SLD)