Effects of an intervention by teachers and researchers to enhance mathematics and reading self-concepts were studied for 162 Australian students in grades 3 through 6 with low academic self-concept. Implications of the modest enhancement of self-concept for specific facets over a relatively short period are discussed. (SLD)

Race was more salient than sex when 93 white preschool children (46 males and 47 females) in a virtually all-white community characterized photographs of others, but sex and race were equally salient in self-classification. Consistency between cognitive and affective responses increased with subjects' ages from 3.0 to 5.7 years. (SLD)

Nineteen fifth and 11 sixth graders given preliminary instruction about a computer-based problem-solving game received additional problem-solving training, problem-solving and self-monitoring training, or no further training. The beneficial impact of the monitoring training is discussed as evidence of the importance of the monitoring strategy in…

The accuracy of 210 college undergraduates' judgments of the relative learnability of original (Army training manuals) and rewritten (war or cultural histories) versions of 20 pairs of texts of known difficulty was studied. Students were 95 percent accurate in their judgments of learnability. Implications for college textbook selection are…

Two experiments compared the working memory performance of 77 highly gifted seventh and eighth graders (13 and 14 Years ole) with verbal or mathematical precocity, or both. Different types of intellectual talent correlate with different working memory characteristics and differences in how digit and word stimuli are represented in memory. (SLD)

The impact of personalizing mathematical word problems and rewording them for explicitness was tested with 68 second and 59 fifth graders. Second graders benefited from personalization and rewording in combination; fifth graders benefited from personalization, not rewording. Personalization makes problems more motivating and easier to represent…

A mathematics achievement test was taken by 132 U.S. and 110 Japanese fifth graders. Scores were higher for the Japanese, and relatively better for computation than problem solving. The reverse was true for the U.S. students. Results are discussed in terms of amount and kind of exposure to mathematics. (SLD)

How people evaluate primary and secondary sources when considering historical questions was studied by asking eight historians and eight high school seniors to think aloud while reviewing written and pictorial documents about the Battle of Lexington. Differences between the groups are discussed concerning cognitive processes and beliefs about…

New methods for representing the structural properties of domain-specific knowledge were studied. Network representations of data from 40 college students' ratings of the relatedness of domain concepts were derived using the Pathfinder scaling algorithm, and similarity between students' and instructor's networks was then assessed using a…

The nine-factor productivity model of science achievement of H. J. Walberg (1981) was tested through structural equation modeling using national longitudinal data on middle-school seventh grade students' science achievement (n=3,116). The better fit provided by a revised model with eight factors is discussed, and implications for educational…

Performance on a battery of tests of vocabulary words by 72 college students was compared as a function of whether the prior instruction involved presenting material in an organized or scrambled fashion. Organizing vocabulary words during study facilitated performance in categorizing, processing for understanding, or producing a word. (SLD)

Potential mechanisms mediating the facilitative effects of elaborative interrogation on associative memory were investigated with Canadian university students reading facts about Canadian provinces. One hundred subjects answered "why" questions about each fact, whereas 10 subjects in the control group did not. Conditions under which elaborative…

Students tend to emphasize important information more than less important information in their lecture notes. Whether this strategy changes with lecture repetition was investigated in 3 experiments with 71 undergraduate students. Students' assessments and shifts of strategy with lecture repetition are discussed. (SLD)

Whether software-based mediated instruction reduces the incidence of misconceptions and errors by children learning the LOGO computer language was studied with 24 fourth and 46 second graders. Mediated instruction reduced errors and misconceptions compared to those detected in prior studies. The roles of working memory and true misunderstandings…

To investigate whether there are 2 types of test-anxious students, those with poor study skills and those with difficulties in retrieving material, study skills training or anxiety desensitization were provided to 84 high test-anxious university students in Israel. Results support the theory of two types of test-anxious students. (SLD)