A study assessed dimensions of children's reading motivations by giving them a revised version of the Motivations for Reading Questionnaire (MRQ). The MRQ is designed to assess 11 possible dimensions of reading motivations, including reading efficacy, several intrinsic and several extrinsic reading motivations, social aspects of reading, and the…

A study examined whether the need for feedback varied with students' metacognitive knowledge monitoring abilities. Subjects were 59 fifth-grade students--35 females and 24 males. Students were given a list of 25 words with instructions to check off whether they knew or did not know each of the words; a multiple choice vocabulary test containing…

One fifth grade student, Martha, was encouraged to develop her informal ratio and proportion strategies during a 6-month teaching experiment. The challenges Martha faced during the teaching experiment are described. The current study supports the claim made by Kaput and West (1994) that initial instruction on ratio and proportion based on…

This paper reports on a teaching experiment involving decimal instruction conducted with a class of elementary students (n=20) in a public school of a small city. After doing extensive work with multiplication, division, ratio, and fractions through an innovative mathematics curriculum, fifth grade students were introduced to decimal numbers. To…

A volume in the Scholastic Homework Reference Series, this document provides fourth to sixth grade students and their parents with the information they need to complete U.S. history assignments. With the help of Dial-A-Teacher, which has operated a telephone helpline since 1979, this American history reference guide presents easy-to-understand…

A study compared the exclusive use of an electronic speller, the exclusive use of a personal spelling dictionary, as well as the use of a combination of the two, as tools for students to increase their consistent use of standard spelling. Subjects, 21 heterogeneously grouped fifth-grade students attending a suburban elementary school, completed a…

Fifty-nine fifth-grade students were asked to use an unfamiliar textbook on a familiar topic to locate the answers to three questions, all of which contained terms that could be found in the book's index. As an analysis of covariance indicated, those who were asked guiding questions before and during their search were more successful in locating…

This study focused on analyzing children's difficulties with two-step mathematical word problems. Seventy-one fifth-grade children in Puerto Rico were individually observed solving five problems. Two of these were two-step problems; the remaining three were one-step problems with the same mathematical structures as the components of the two-step…

Examined whether a copy theory of memory that views memory as essentially a library of stored experiences, or a generative memory model that depends on constructive and integrative processes is more descriptive of the memory representation of children and adults. (Author/SDH)

This article describes how the author makes the story of "Don Quixote de la Mancha" come alive to fifth graders in her Spanish class. She rewrote several scenes from the novel into short plays that were appropriate to the students' interests and to their novice-high proficiency level. The author chose a combination of scenes that offer…

The Michigan Elementary Geography Test (MEGT) was completed by 1,689 fifth-grade students in 64 classrooms from 20 school districts in Michigan. This article provides representative questions from MEGT and presents data regarding student performance on these questions. (Author/RM)

This workbook provides practice for children in spelling 102 words found in spelling and reading texts for fifth grade, words that research has shown to be most frequently misspelled or misused at the elementary level. The workbook is designed to reach the different learning strengths of children through a process of seeing, hearing, tracing, and…