This study discusses the effectiveness of the use of simulations in a social studies classroom. The purposes were to: (1) define a simulation; (2) discuss its origin and underlying educational philosophy that advocates its uses in the classroom; and (3) analyze the current literature available and answer some of the controversial questions posed…

This educational program on drugs and alcohol provides a "No-Use" message to students. The curriculum maintains that alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drugs are unhealthy and harmful, and that society's laws and values are to be respected. The lessons build students' resistance to influences that encourage drug abuse and they promote safe, healthy,…

Two studies examined the effectiveness of the PASS (Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, and Successive cognitive processes) theory of intelligence in predicting reading achievement scores of normally achieving children and distinguishing children with reading disabilities from normally achieving children. The first study dealt with predicting…

A study explored the question of the development of recall for narrative and informative texts. Subjects, 60 5th- 8th-, and 11th-grade students from a rural area of Quebec, representing all levels of achievement, were presented with an informative text and a narrative text. Results indicated that: (1) the narrative text elicited a longer recall…

This report examines cases of students learning from their experiences in a fifth grade classroom as they studied a U.S. history curriculum organized around concepts that would not only help students understand history but also be powerful in their lives, concepts that planners hoped would make students more human. The teacher-researchers also…

This practicum was designed to assist the 25 students in one fifth-grade classroom where students projected a predominant feeling of not wanting to attend school and where many students, although all average to above average in intelligence, were not attaining consistent scores for achievement in relation to their potential. A 12-week program was…

The relationships among prior knowledge, learning strategy use, interest, learning goals, and conceptual understanding were studied with 72 fifth graders from 3 science classrooms. In September 1996 students completed a knowledge test designed to assess their prior knowledge and conceptual understanding of ecological concepts (plant and animal…

A study compared the number of word definitions retained by students who looked up words and wrote down definitions to the number of words retained by students who had the stories and definitions read aloud to them. Subjects, 20 boys and 20 girls in a Florida school, reading on the fifth grade level, were randomly divided into control and…

The research reported in this paper is a case study of one student's learning in a writers' workshop where two teacher-researchers were developing new curriculum and instructional practices. The case study was developed out of a larger qualitative study in which 47 fifth-grade students' growth as writers was studied over a 1-year period as they…

Prior to their first curriculum unit (on history and the work of historians) in an American history course, three classes of fifth graders stated what they knew (or thought was true) about history and what they wanted to learn about it. After the unit, they reported what they had learned. In addition, a stratified sample of 10 students was…

It is generally well accepted in the adult literature that the quality of friendships correlates well with loneliness and the number of friends one has does not. This study investigated children's self-reports of quantity and quality of friendships as predictors of loneliness. Subjects (N=64) were third, fourth, and fifth-grade students enrolled…

This study investigated the influence of instrumental music instruction on the academic achievement of fifth grade students. The sample consisted of 270 fifth grade students (135 boys and 135 girls) located in a southwestern Kansas school district in a city of approximately 20,000 people. The independent variables considered were: instrumental…

Recognizing that enhancing the interpersonal problem solving skills of children as young as age four can reduce or prevent high-risk behaviors later on, researchers designed a competence-building model of primary prevention. The two criteria tested were: (1) the theory of interpersonal cognitive problem solving (ICPS) skills as mediators of social…

New York's Division of Substance Abuse Services conducted a major survey in 1989-1990 of students in grades five through twelve: past surveys of the Division had included only students in seventh through twelfth grades. Students in the fifth and sixth grades answered a separate, self-administered questionnaire, which included questions about the…

A study examined how many and what kind of questions appear in elementary science and social studies textbooks and teachers' manuals. Approximately 7500 questions from fourth and fifth grade science and social science textbooks from three major publishers were classified according to the following characteristics: (1) type of cognitive demand; (2)…