Efficacious features claimed by experts who had rewritten texts were evaluated in 3 experiments involving 700 undergraduates and 52 instructional texts about Army job tasks. Some experts evidently had effective knowledge about improving text, but it was primarily procedural. (SLD)

In two experiments, a total of 78 female college students, who were novices about automobile mechanics, read technical passages about vehicle braking systems with and without illustrations that were labeled or unlabeled. Results indicate that illustrations help readers focus attention and form mental models. (SLD)

A longitudinal study of 1,329 students and the 141 mathematics teachers they had before and after transfer to junior high examined the relationship between students' beliefs in mathematics and their teachers' sense of efficacy. Teacher efficacy beliefs had a stronger impact on low-achieving than high-achieving students. (SLD)

The impact of teacher and student sex differences and student assessment of teacher sex role orientation on student attitudes toward learning was examined with 252 undergraduate students, each evaluating 1 teacher. Results do not support the sex role congruency hypothesis. Students were more affected by overall teacher qualities. (SLD)

That reflectiveness was directly related to creative problem-solving was tested in two experiments with 58 college students solving induction problems by conventional or unconventional rules. Extremely reflective or extremely impulsive students on conventional problems performed worse on the unconventional problems than did those moderately…

Five geometry experiments with 127 Australian high school students found that guidance provided in a format requiring attention to two sources of information resulted in performance no better than that on conventional problems. A format not requiring split attention resulted in the superiority of worked examples over conventional problems. (SLD)

Teaching college students to discriminate among and use text structures found in scientific text material was studied, using 32 undergraduate and 28 junior college students. Students can learn to become more effective processors of scientific text through acquiring active reading strategies based on domain specific knowledge. (SLD)

The effects of pictorial illustrations on memory for text were studied in 144 college students. Two experiments indicated that illustrations serve a supplementary function; adjunct pictures alone, without special processing instructions, do not help learners encode information that is not normally encoded in the first place. (SLD)

Measures of working memory capacity and measures of word knowledge were used as predictors of three measures of reading skills in 95 undergraduates. Vocabulary size and speed of accessing it were independent of word knowledge. Reading comprehension, reading speed, and text inferencing ability were independent measures of reading skill. (SLD)

Research with 32 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old British children demonstrated that children at different reading levels relied on different types of cues in recognizing words. Older children used grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules in recognizing words and were much more flexible than were beginning readers in their response patterns. (SLD)

Three studies of language comprehension skills compared 9- and 10-year-old learning-disabled children (LDC) with difficulty retaining verbal information (n=8) with LDC with normal memory spans (n=8) and normally achieving children (n=16). LDC did not have significant impairments in listening comprehension. However, LDC may experience difficulties…

Three experiments with 220 undergraduates generating or exposed to misspellings between two successive spelling tests indicated that experience with misspellings can be detrimental to subsequent performance. People may store multiple spelling versions of some words. Techniques using incorrect spellings are questionable methods of teaching or…

The effects of classroom practices on stratification of students' self-perceptions of math ability were estimated in 67 upper elementary math classes (N=1,612 students) from predominantly White, middle-class communities. Results suggest that the effects of task structure depend on the actual dispersion of ability levels in the class. (SLD)

Pairs of friends and pairs of classmates were observed to determine effects of existing social relationships on interactions during cooperative learning. No significant differences between observed interactions were found for 60 third and 70 seventh graders, but friends reported that they engaged in more activities outside the experimental…

Structural equation analysis of the cognitive engagement (CE) of 100 fifth and 175 sixth graders in science activities demonstrated that students who placed greater emphasis on task-mastery goals reported more active CE. Students oriented toward social recognition, pleasing the teacher, or avoiding work had a lower level of CE. (SLD)