Teachers' reasons for referral to special education and evaluations of the referral process were studied in a suburban elementary school of about 500 students where prereferral and inclusion were being implemented. Promising impacts of prereferral and inclusion practices are found, and issues surrounding learning disabilities are highlighted. (SLD)

Two studies involving 448 sixth graders and 329 college undergraduates investigated the categorization of students' correct and incorrect responses to domain-specific analogy problems. Cross-study results provided support for the response categories proposed by P. Alexander (1990) and their hierarchical structure. (SLD)

In an experiment involving 60 college students, students trained with knowledge maps retained more macro-level ideas from text passages than students not given the training. In a second experiment with 53 college students, training facilitated recall of both macro-level and micro-level ideas. (SLD)

In four experiments involving 357 undergraduates, students who read expository passages with seductive details (interesting but irrelevant details) recalled fewer main ideas and generated fewer problem-solving transfer solutions than those who read passages without seductive details. Results suggest that seductive details may prime inappropriate…

Student profiles generated from knowledge, interest, and strategy measures were studied and changes in profiles across a semester were studied for 329 college students. There were three distinct groups of students at pretest and four at posttest. The Learning-Oriented cluster remained fairly constant from pretest to posttest. (SLD)

The role of executive control in the revising problems of 12 eighth graders with writing and learning difficulties was studied by providing students with executive support in the process. Compared with revising under normal conditions, executive support made the revision process easier for students and improved their revising behavior. (SLD)

Forty-eight kindergarten children were assigned to phoneme identity, phoneme manipulation, or language experience programs. Children in the manipulation program made greater gains in blending and segmentation, but children in the phoneme identity condition made greater gains on a test of phonetic cue reading. Implications for reading instruction…

An individual differences model of learning from instructional text was tested with 211 Air Force recruits. Results strongly supported the model, which suggests that learning from text is determined by making connections among ideas that include the text and prior learning. Making the connections depends on individual differences. (SLD)

Examining self-reported verbal protocols and online measures of spelling latencies for 93 elementary school students showed that children seem to use a relatively sequential read-out from long-term memory when directly retrieving a spelling, but they use a consonant pair strategy for final consonant clusters when spelling out a word. (SLD)

The contributions of peer acceptance, friendship, social status, and age relative to mixed-age classmates to children's' attitudes toward school and to achievement in ungraded primary school were studied with 323 ungraded elementary school students. Attitudes toward school were positively related to achievement scores. Predictive variables are…

The rates of both teacher responsiveness and student participation were examined in the classroom question-asking context with six science teachers and 165 fifth through eighth graders. Findings suggest the need to focus on the roles of both teachers and students in creating and maintaining sex differences in student-teacher interaction. (SLD)

Through hierarchical linear modeling, student reports of the avoidance of help seeking were related to student and classroom characteristics of 516 sixth graders. Avoidance of help seeking was related negatively to academic efficacy, but was less strongly related to academic efficacy in classrooms where teachers thought they should tend to…

Three studies involving 4-year olds and 5-year olds from Hong Kong (samples of 36, 10, and 12) and the United States show that Chinese children surpass their English and American counterparts in rote counting and place value numeration as well as embedded ten-cardinal understanding. Implications are discussed. (SLD)

First and second graders (n=285) received one of three types of classroom reading programs: (1) direct instruction in letter-sound correspondence; (2) less direct instruction in sound-spelling patterns; and (3) implicit instructions in the alphabetic code while reading connected text. Results show advantages of reading programs that emphasize…

Elementary school teachers (n=68) rated 374 students on aspects of motivation for reading. Qualitative and quantitative results show that teachers perceive higher achievers to be relatively higher in intrinsic reading motivation (individual and topical) than in extrinsic reading motivation (activity-based and autonomy-supported), with lower…