The purpose of this study was to explore native-language teachers' efforts in technology-rich classrooms. The advancement of classroom technology and educational policies in Taiwan prompted native-language teachers to leverage technology that improved learning and instruction in native languages. Fifteen senior teachers participated in in-depth…

Prospective and practicing elementary teachers have historically demonstrated anxiety about mathematics, which can affect their mathematics teaching and their students' math anxiety. Yet, developing productive dispositions prior to teacher preparation programs is rarely addressed in the research. We propose mindset messaging in mathematics courses…

The thinking processes of students of Logo were examined to identify programming problems and possible instructional remedies. Subjects were 11 students between the ages of 8 and 12 who had completed 5 weeks of Logo instruction. These students were given a series of five short programming problems highlighting such areas of difficulty as judging…

Results support the general conclusion that the disposition to respond in either a reflective or impulsive fashion influences the problem-solving efficiency and strategy behavior of elementary school children. The relative impact of cognitive style on problem solving varied with developmental level and the type of problem solved. (Author/BJG)

First-, third-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children were administered 20 relational reasoning problems in which they had to deduce the possible sizes of one item relative to two others on the basis of a visual comparison and a written clue. Dramatic differences were observed between fifth- and sixth-grade children. Corrective feedback improved…

Three experiments investigated effects of attentional factors on children's learning set performance. Younger children's learning was differentially affected by two or more irrelevant dimensions. Practice improved performance for all ages. Results confirmed that irrelevant dimensions and within-problems exposure interact with age and amount of…

Whether hierarchical ordering among fraction identification problems reflects the replacement of simple rules by complex rules was investigated. Latent class techniques revealed that children applied rules that were adequate for simple problems but had to be replaced to solve more complex problems. (Author/GK)

Discusses five research areas offering guidance to people concerned about teaching problem solving in elementary schools. Areas are (1) components of problem difficulty; (2) the contribution of reading difficulties to problem-solving deficiencies; (3) characteristics of successful problem solvers; (4) children's use of problem-solving techniques…

Studied structures and relationships in one-step additive and multiplicative problems solved by 450 students in grades 2, 3, and 4. Results show that the facility ratio of the problems differs by structure, situation, and the sequence of data. The ability to solve one-step problems increases with age, but relative problem difficulty is grade…

This research investigated developmental shifts in the character of children's tool using activity in the domain of scale drawing. Fifty-five children from three grade levels (grades 3, 5, and 7) were individually interviewed as they participated in both enlarging and reducing a one-dimensional object, the letter "F," to a scale of four.…

Two experiments investigated children's strategies for solving geometric matrices that were correctly or incorrectly completed and that varied in number of elements and number of transformations. Examining the relationship between working memory and item complexity, the first experiment tested 90 boys and girls of 7, 10, and 13 years of age for…

Evidence is provided for gradual age (and, seemingly, cognitive developmental) changes in the acquisition of complex problem solving strategies. Differential performance as a function of exposure to a child-model exhibiting the best strategy also suggests the role of learning in strategy acquisition. (Author/MV)

Two experiments tested the idea that the means by which children acquire efficacy information can produce different levels of task motivation and self-perception of competence. In Experiment 1, children periodically received either ability attributional feedback, effort feedback, ability plus effort feedback, or no attributional feedback. Although…

This study attempted to identify the things that help elementary school students solve verbal problems. Among the types of things included for examination were: the attributes of problems, the tools used, and the problem transformations that were possible. The summary of findings is comprised of 29 diverse types of statements grouped under four…

Variation in syntactic difficulty in arithmetic problems is studied to determine its influence on students' ability to solve problems correctly. Findings in a study of elementary school students indicated syntactic difficulty affects problem solving ability, regardless of sex (f=fiche number). (MH)