The authors placed 5th-grade students into small groups of 3 in order to examine the impact of group discussion and displayed effort on children's evaluations of a low-achieving peer. Low effort by a target peer resulted in negative evaluations across attributional, affective, help-giving, and social response dimensions. Children who participated…

The authors investigated the microlevel processes of collaborative reasoning in heterogeneous peer dyads working on an open-design task in elementary geometry. Special attention was paid to the nature of student social interaction, problem-solving strategies, and mathematical language and how they shape collaborative problem-solving processes.…

Studied the roles of motivation and self-regulated task behavior for early school achievement differences among young (aged 5 through 8) economically at-risk (n=85) and not at-risk (n=42) children. Findings show that child- and teacher-reported motivation levels were comparable among at-risk and not-at risk children, but at-risk children showed…

Tested a model of the influence of homework on classroom performance using a sample of 429 students in grades 2 and 4, their parents, and their 28 teachers. Data reveal the critical role of parents in both the homework process and the success of elementary school students. Positive parent involvement in homework was the strongest predictor of…

Conducted a 6-year followup of almost 4,000 students in Project STAR in Tennessee, a 4-year, large-scale randomized experiment on the effects of class size. Though follow-up data could not be obtained on more than one-half of the students, class size effects persisted for at least 6 years and remained large enough to be of importance for…

Used the four curriculum orientations defined by J. McNeil (1996) to demonstrate how hierarchical confirmatory factor analysis can be applied to measure the meta-orientation construct. The analysis of teacher data collected by a curriculum orientation inventory from 675 primary school teachers in Hong Kong provided clear support for the…

Compared three residual-based methods for indexing school effectiveness using data from elementary schools in Maryland. Results indicate that the hierarchical linear model approach had higher stability across achievement test forms. Results further suggest that when only school-level data are available, the use of either of the school-level models…

Studied relationships among achievement, self-concept, and motivation in mathematics and language arts in a longitudinal two-wave, three-variable panel study involving three cohorts of Norwegian elementary school students (n=1,005). In all cohorts, results were consistent with a skill-development model of the achievement/self-concept relationship.…

Data from national samples from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 were used to study gender differences in mathematics achievement. Gender differences were not found when total group means were compared, but noteworthy differences favoring males were found at the high end of the score distributions. (SLD)

Impact of situated cognition on map skill retention and cognitive style effects on learning were studied with 45 fourth graders. Immediate postperformance assessment did not differ for experimental and conventional instruction groups, and conventional instruction groups performed better after delay. Cognitive style affected learning only in the…

A model of parental inducement of academic self-regulation was tested with 105 elementary school students who were surveyed to assess their perceptions of parental influences on their academic self-regulation and their own self-regulatory behavior. Findings indicate the importance of parental inducement to academic self-regulation. (SLD)

A Cox regression model was used to examine the career paths of 2,327 elementary school first-year teachers. Variables studied (sex, age, ethnicity, education, and certification route) explained about 10% of the variation in teacher continuation in teaching. Future studies of teacher survival should consider additional teacher-related variables.…

The process of implementing cooperative learning in the classroom was studied over a school year for nine elementary school teachers. Most teachers became increasingly proficient at implementing the student team-achievement divisions type of cooperative learning, but considerable planning and monitoring were needed to ensure success. (SLD)

A school work culture productivity model is reviewed, and the development of a culture productivity instrument based on the model is reported. Second-order component analysis of responses of 416 elementary school educators showed broad areas of generalization across the primary work culture components. (SLD)

Attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, and classroom practices of 476 teachers in 24 urban and suburban elementary schools were assessed with teacher questionnaires and observation. Teachers serving students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds put more emphasis on teacher authority and control and were more doubtful of student abilities. (SLD)