Theory of mind (ToM) allows children to achieve success in the social world by understanding others' minds. A study with 3- to 12-year-olds, however, demonstrates that gains in ToM are linked to decreases in children's desire to engage in performative behaviors associated with health and well-being, such as singing and dancing. One hundred and…

Two innovative programs in Belgium promote both educational equity and quality as they reach out to ethnically diverse families. The Bridge Person project in Ghent addresses Belgium's immigrant achievement gap by creating meaningful relationships between schools and socially disadvantaged families. The School in Sight project in Antwerp seeks to…

A number of countries, including Ireland, have experienced a recent growth in the prevalence of "shadow education", that is, paid private tuition outside the schooling system. Previous international studies have indicated that such tuition can enhance academic performance and facilitate access to tertiary education. However, such studies…

A total of 320 subjects in five grades (two, four, six, eight, ten) and from two types of school settings (middle-class and disadvantaged) were studied. Subjects learned eight-pair lists of familiar nouns in a standard paired-associates task. Each subject learned two lists, one presented visually and the other, aurally. Performance on the visual…

The relative development of Piagetian concrete logical operational abilities was investigated in Mexican American and Anglo American children. Performance was assessed on eight classification tasks and three forms of transitivity, measuring seriation skills. One phase of the study compared the performances of 30 Anglo and 30 Mexican American…

Children prerated paired-associate nouns for likability and then learned them. The relationship between childrens' self concept and learning of affectively assessed verbal material was examined. Results indicate that learning along an affective dimension of meaningfulness can be influenced by personality-related variables such as self-concept.…

The social factors that impact Caucasian middle-class women's practice of breast self-examination (BSE) were examined through in-depth interviews with 15 women who were selected to represent a mix of women who practiced BSE monthly, occasionally, or never. The meaning of BSE was analyzed in relation to body image and the social definition of being…

AS PART OF THE RESEARCH ON THE INFLUENCE OF RESPONSE-CONTINGENT REINFORCERS ON THE LEARNING AND PROBLEM-SOLVING BEHAVIOR OF CHILDREN, THE EFFECTS OF A LIMITED NUMBER OF VARIABLES ON THE PERFORMANCE OF CHILDREN OF THREE AGE LEVELS (4-5, 7-8, AND 10-11), SELECTED EQUALLY FROM MIDDLE- AND LOWER-CLASS BACKGROUNDS, WERE INVESTIGATED. THE EXPERIMENTAL…

In general, the lower-class student has been considered scholastically inferior to the child of middle-class origins. More specifically, such a child has frequently been explicitly or implicitly denied the benefits of a foreign language learning experience on the basis of his/her inability to cope with the difficulty level assumed to be inherent…

Six speech and language clinicians, 3 black and 3 white, administered the Goodenough Drawing Test (1926) to 144 preschoolers. The 4 groups, lower-socioeconomic black and white and middle-socioeconomic black and white, were equally divided by sex. The biracial clinical setting was shown to influence test scores in black preschool age children.…

Four research papers on temperament and school learning and two commentaries are presented. "Early Temperament and Later Educational Outcomes," by Jacqueline V. Lerner, Stella Chess, and Kathleen Lenerz, discusses temperament characteristics and academic attainment. One hundred thirty-three middle class subjects were studied from early infancy…