The "Current Insights" feature is designed to introduce life science educators and researchers to current articles of interest in other social science and education journals. In this installment, I highlight three diverse research studies out of psychology journals that address student study strategies, faculty change, and the influence…

Despite recent findings that show fluency deficits in developmental readers, the field of developmental reading remains remiss in fluency instruction. This article provides a summary intended to increase college reading teachers' understanding of reading fluency and fluency instruction. In addition, included are the step-by-step procedures of…

The purpose of this study was to reduce the negative effects that self-perceived levels of test anxiety have on third-grade students. The participants in this study consisted of 177 third-grade students at two Midwestern public elementary schools. Students at one school were taught relaxation techniques, while students at the second school served…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of the Jigsaw method, a cooperative learning tool, on content knowledge and attitude toward learning science. A group of 64 students in an 8th grade physical science class located in rural western New York participated in this study. As an intervention for this action research study, science…

This article summarizes a dissertation study designed to determine the effectiveness of instructional interventions that focus on proofreading and editing skills of first-year college students enrolled in business communication courses. The study used a pretest-posttest quasiexperimental control group design and collected data from 56 participants…

For RCTs of education interventions, it is often of interest to estimate associations between student and mediating teacher practice outcomes, to examine the extent to which the study's conceptual model is supported by the data, and to identify specific mediators that are most associated with student learning. This paper develops statistical power…

This paper reports on an intervention study which investigated the effect of teaching English phonotactics upon Arabic speakers' lexical segmentation of running speech in English. The study involved a native English-speaking group (N = 12), a non-native control group (N = 20); and a non-native experimental group (N = 20). Each group was pre-tested…

To investigate the influence of an innovative math fluency intervention, 36 middle-school students were randomly assigned to either an experimental (the Detect, Practice, Repair [DPR]) or control condition (reading intervention). After covarying pretest scores, the DPR treatment produced a significantly higher (p = 0.016) adjusted mean (M) math…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of a short intervention program designed to enhance the educators' ability to identify children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD). Twenty early childhood and 20 physical education teachers (n = 40) participated in the study. Participants were randomly assigned into an…

The ability to derive the meanings of words from supportive story contexts was studied in 45 7- to 8-year-olds. Children read short stories each containing a different novel word and defined the word at the end of each story. There were three intervention sessions. One group was asked to justify their definition and subsequently received feedback…

This guide is intended to be useful to educators in high schools and middle schools, to superintendents and school boards, and to state policymakers in planning and executing dropout prevention strategies. The target audience includes school administrators as well as district-level administrators, seeking to help develop practice and policy…

Family-school collaboration related to children's physical development has become increasingly important as childhood obesity rates continue to rise. The present study described the development and implementation of a literacy-based, family component of a school-based health education program and investigated its viability, acceptability, and…

This article evaluates the utility of the Early Authors Program, a 12-month early literacy intervention emphasizing highly meaningful language interactions that was implemented in childcare facilities in an ethnically and linguistically diverse, urban, low-income community. Children learn to be writers and readers by creating their own…

Introduction: In recent decades there has been a well warranted interest in the topic of self-regulated learning, or more recently, in developing the competency "learning how to learn". Research has shown substantial differences between those students and teachers who work along these lines, as compared to others who do not. This paper studies the…