This paper is based on efforts to bring change to school mathematics by trying to develop mathematics classroom communities in predominantly minority classrooms. In these communities, students work towards doing mathematics by working on open-ended, investigative situations; sharing ideas and strategies; and jointly negotiating meanings. Students…

The 33 activities in this book reinforce the rules of written English by providing students with practice in editing a variety of formats. The activities help students develop a basic understanding of the rules of grammar and mechanics (generally taught in grades 4-5) in context and exercise their critical thinking abilities by identifying content…

In this article, the meanings students construct and the conceptual advances they make as they deal with ratio and proportion problems are described. The study cites episodes with a second grader, two fifth graders, and three seventh graders. A critical factor in students' comprehension of and solution to ratio and proportion problems is their…

This paper is a report on the results of a 3-year teaching experiment conducted in Ithaca, New York, introducing students to the concepts of multiplication, division, and ratio as a trio, and to ratio and proportion in a project-based curriculum with heterogeneous grouping. Fractions were introduced as a subset of ratio and proportion. The paper…

This activity guide, developed to provide hands-on environmental education activities geared to South Mountains State Park in North Carolina, is targeted for grades 4 and 5 and meets curriculum objectives of the standard course of study established by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. Three types of activities are included:…

This paper challenges the assumption that meaning is in some way magically encoded within texts and argues that questions, when they are used simply as tools to lead readers to a single meaning, are inadequate as a means of reading comprehension assessment. The paper then goes on to describe one of a series of micro case studies that explored…

One of eight papers from Project Seed, this paper considers the difficulties many parents experience when talking to their children about sex. It describes a program that responds to how, when, and what to say to children about sexuality by involving both parents and children in four 2-hour evening workshop sessions on building communication…

A study determined the effect of three types of text structures (attribution, comparison, and collection) on fifth graders' reading comprehension. Subjects, 71 students from 3 classrooms in 1 public elementary school in southern California, were randomly assigned to 1 of those 3 conditions. There was no instruction given. Students read…

Specific mechanisms of classroom interactions by which teachers and students conjecture, criticize, explain, test, and refine ideas and procedures is what is referred to as "negotiation of meaning in the mathematics classroom." Elaboration of the form these mechanisms take in practice, and hence investigation of classroom constructions…

This practicum was designed to decrease the number of aggressive responses to conflict by fifth grade students. The goal was to increase student awareness of peaceful resolutions while decreasing the number of teacher interventions in student conflicts. To educate students on conflict resolution, the Community Board Curriculum for conflict…

This study compared the creative thinking areas of flexibility and fluency of fifth grade Japanese and American children. A new instrument for cross-cultural settings, consisting of ten flexibility items and six fluency items, was constructed and administered to fifth graders. The results indicated that there were no differences in fluency between…

A study used a primed lexical decision task to explore readers' use of "onset" and "rime" units in processing words. Onset segments include the initial consonant or consonant cluster of a syllable, while rime segments consist of the pronounced vowel group and any final consonants. Subjects were 32 fifth graders and 27 college…

To investigate factors influencing holistic writing evaluations, writing samples from children in grades two and five were evaluated holistically by a team of teachers. Papers were rated from one, for a poorly written paper, to four, for an excellent paper at that grade level. Correlations were run between holistic ratings and both traditional…

A study was conducted for additional support of the view that bridging--drawing inferences to relate a sentence to a preceding sentence--occurs during reading rather than at the time of testing. Subjects were 88 third and 67 fifth grade students whose reading proficiency was measured by performance on the Metropolitan Achievement Test. The…

Seventy-five fifth grade students were administered an interest inventory to determine their attitudes toward reading and the kinds of reading materials they preferred. In addition, an observer completed reading behavior checklists for each student, and the students completed a second inventory to discover the amount of reading they did as opposed…