This report describes and evaluates two programs which deal with chronic status offenders: the Grimes Alternative School Program, a delinquency prevention project which targets intermediate school (grades 4 and 5) students with chronic discipline and/or truant behaviors, and the Home Remedies Program, a short-term crisis intervention and…

This practicum report describes a reading program that was designed and implemented to help improve reading attitudes among fifth grade children. A target group of 17 fifth-graders were unmotivated and uninterested in reading, and TV occupied a great deal of their out-of-class time. Solution strategies involved encouraging parents, teachers, and…

Underachievement in the classroom is a problem which confronts educators and national initiatives such as America 2000. Little field research exists to evaluate the effectiveness of classroom interventions on improving academic performance of the underachiever. A field study was designed and implemented by school psychologists which focused on…

A study investigated the correlation between students' learning styles and their academic achievement on report cards and standardized tests. Subjects were 58 fifth-grade students in a suburban middle school. The "Learning Style Inventory" by Brown and Cooper was administered to this population, and students' academic averages and…

A study investigated whether reading instruction that emphasizes critical thinking would benefit "learning-disabled" fifth-grade students. Seven students were assigned to an instructional group that participated in a program of 10 dialogical-thinking reading lessons and 7 were assigned to a comparison group that remained with the…

This study investigated children's perceptions of effort expenditure in goal-related action. A total of 20 kindergartners, 23 second graders, and 25 fifth graders listened to 6 stories that depicted actors using various amounts of effort in pursuit of either a positive or negative goal. Children rated how much the actor wanted to reach the goal,…

Library skills were taught to 600 fifth- and sixth-grade students in an effort to indoctrinate them into becoming library users. (Author/PF)

Concludes that children who watched crime shows identified with the television character but that attitudes toward the police were influenced more by attitudes of friends and family. (RB)

Instruments have been used for centuries in mathematical experience and in the teaching tradition as well. One example is cultural instruments inherited from tradition (e.g., rulers, abaci, compasses, curve-drawing devices) that have followed or anticipated the theoretical development of mathematics. In this article, the authors analyze two cases…

This manual outlines a time-limited group intervention for children in grades 4 and 5 who are experiencing parental divorce. Part A, "Overview and Program Organization" (Neil Kalter), includes an introduction to the manual, an overview of developmental facilitation groups, and a discussion on group organization. Part B presents guidelines and…

This study was conducted to examine three explanations for gender differences in computer use and attitudes: (1) sex-typed females avoid computers if they perceive computers to be a male domain; (2) sex differences in video game use mediate sex differences in computer use; and (3) sex differences in attributional style mediate sex differences in…

A study compared the relative effectiveness of a direct instruction method for finding the main idea in a text with a method that combined direct instruction with a checklist that encouraged the students to monitor their application of the main idea strategy. Subjects, 56 fifth-graders at a suburban elementary school, were divided into one of…

A study answered the question: are there significant differences in scores for two forms of the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests, Third Edition? Subjects, 23 fifth graders, were given Forms K and L, Level 5/6, of the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Test. The tests were administered by the regular classroom teacher in two testing sessions. Students were…

A prime concern of problem-solving instruction is to maximize positive transfer of learning from a previously solved problem to a new problem. One aspect of the relationship between transfer of learning and problem-solving instruction is the order of problem presentation. In this study, order of problem presentation is controlled, while certain…