Purpose: The authors asked whether adolescents with Down syndrome (DS) could fast-map novel nouns and verbs when word learning depended on using the speaker's pragmatic or syntactic cues. Compared with typically developing (TD) comparison children, the authors predicted that syntactic cues would prove harder for the group with DS to use and that…

Cognition-related brain responses to meaningful and meaningless figures were registered in 5-year-old kindergarten children who either had been subtyped as being at-risk of developing an L- or P-type dyslexia (LAL versus LAP) or who were not at-risk. While identifying, naming, or categorizing pictures, event-related potentials (ERP) were…

In this article, the authors emphasize the role of elementary social studies teachers as citizen activists and reformers. The authors call upon all teachers to become AGENTS for change in order to strengthen the role of social studies in elementary schools, to guarantee that all students have an equitable opportunity to learn social studies, and…

To derive a model for testing, research questions were formulated which asked how long news coverage viewed in the past continues to influence the perceived salience of issues and the rate at which the influence drops off. To do this, some common factors that have been shown to affect public perceptions of issue salience, such as the prominence of…

This paper outlines Explanation Construction Theory, a psychological theory of how people come to comprehend scientific explanations. Explanation Construction Theory has three components: (1) a theory of how scientific knowledge is represented in memory; (2) a taxonomy of different representations that can be formed in response to an encounter…

This paper compares and contrasts two articles in which Dickens constructs an adult identity through his childhood reading, "A Christmas Tree" (1850) and "Nurse's Stories" (1860), with one in which Dickens constructs the identity of a child in his work for children, "A Child's History of England" (1851-53). Infused…

This conference address examines the question of whether "memory work"--using therapeutic techniques to help clients recover suspected hidden memories of childhood sexual abuse--has led some clients to develop illusory memories or false beliefs. Prospective research on memory for childhood trauma indicates that the gist of traumatic…

Research on teachers and teacher thinking finds itself subject to tensions between two prevailing factions. The first sees promise of progress in the rejection of frequently conservative, idiosyncratic teachers' thoughts; the second embraces those thoughts as expressions of a sacred, lived truth. Detecting conflicting mythologies at the core of…

A study tested the ability of 40 students at Ohio University, 20 Americans and 20 Chinese, to recall parts of nine news headlines flashed at them on pieces of paper. Students in communication subjects or linguistics were excluded as being too knowledgeable in communication theories. The hypothesis for the study stated that native Chinese speakers…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which teachers and students can leverage the power and potential of visuals to encode information and experiences as personalized meanings, and to help people create their own timeless images as ways to understand the world. The foundation is laid for conducting research to test the assertion…

"Deep" approaches to learning, as defined by Biggs (1987) and others, would generally mean that a student is interested in the academic task, searches for meaning in the task, personalizes the task, integrates aspects of the task into a whole, sees relationships between this whole and previous knowledge, and tries to theorize about the…

The K-ABC purports to be a fresh alternative to standardized measures of intellectual functioning, by virtue of separating measurement of acquired factual knowledge from measurement of the ability to solve novel problems. Some researchers have questioned this claim to the capability of distinguishing aptitude and achievement. By analyzing the…

A practicum used a new learning tool to enhance long-term retention of new vocabulary. Sixteen seventh-graders in Language Arts, who had a long-term retention mean score of approximately 40% of newly learned vocabulary, increased their long-term retention of new vocabulary by 25% (a new mean of 65% of new vocabulary). Additional objectives…

The author states that learning theory is useful for economic educators because it enables them to develop instructional theory for economic education. The paper is arranged into five parts. Part 1 focuses on the historical learning theory perspective of economics education. Part 2 defines instructional theory, states its relationship to learning…

Cognitive psychologists believe that knowledge is multifaceted and that people process more than just semantic content from a stimulus array. To investigate the implications of recall and impression formation processing objectives on the representation of serial order in memory and judgment, subjects participated in two recall and impression…