Provides details of 10 students with learning disabilities or behavioral disorders who were taught in a special education resource room using the "Reasoning and Writing" program. Notes students made large and statistically significant gains. Suggests that a relatively brief intervention with "Reasoning and Writing" had a…

Used pretest-posttest control group design to assess how varying task structures (individual or group) and incentive structures (interdependent, dependent, or no-incentive) affected dependent variables (spelling achievement, peer-dominated social status, treatment acceptability) in fifth grade students (N=74). No significant differences in…

Shares how a teacher, librarian, and fourth and fifth grade students collaborated and wrote book reviews for new books in their school library so other students could read about the new acquisitions. (MG)

Forty-eight third- and 48 fifth-graders' ability to monitor comprehension was measured with the error detection paradigm. Some analyses excluded 23 third- and 14 fifth-graders. Cognitively-reflective and impulsive children--distinguished via the Matching Familiar Figures Test--differed significantly on their ability to identify inconsistencies.…

Examines the stability of individual differences in test anxiety and learned helplessness of 82 children in third grade and later in fifth grade. Results indicate that teacher reports of helplessness had the strongest and most consistent relation to concurrent achievement and to achievement test scores two years later. (RJC)

The developing relationship between children's metacognition and reading comprehension was examined for 87 third and 84 fifth graders. Students using the experimental curriculum--Informed Strategies for Learning--made significant gains in metacognition and the use of reading strategies when compared with control students. (TJH)

Compares the effectiveness of direct instruction and basal reading instruction in basic word attack and comprehension skills. Finds students' acquisition of basic sight word vocabulary to be greater when taught by direct instruction than by basal instruction. (RS)

The effects on mathematics achievement of having fifth graders engage in elaborative and integrative processing were studied using 121 students. Subjects were randomly assigned to cognitive-processing, fact-sheet, or control groups. Results show that cognitive processing is related to memory and understanding and is more effective for higher…

Describes a hands-on geography activity that is designed to teach longitude and latitude to fifth-grade students. Children create a scale model of the earth from a 300 gram weather balloon. This activity incorporates geography, mathematics, science, art, and homework. Provides information for obtaining materials. (KO)

Investigated role of word identification skills, text phrasing, auditory analysis, and digit-naming speed on oral reading fluency and expressiveness of poor and average fifth-grade readers. Found that poor readers were less fluent and expressive than average readers; parsing contributed to fluency in average but not poor readers; and digit-naming…

Reports a study that compared the effects of two teacher-directed prereading instructional procedures (directed reading activity versus story grammar/structured overview story mapping) on elementary students' literal and inferential reading comprehension. Story mapping produced better comprehension among third graders but no differences in…

Results from a study involving 32 learning-disabled, 17 gifted, and 14 normally achieving students from grades 4 and 5 support the idea that learning-disabled children's problem-solving performance reflects a weak integration of metacognitive skills with online processing and problem solution. (SLD)

Examines the stability reliability for the Woodcock-Johnson-Revised (WJ-R) and the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement with approximately a two-week retest interval. Results indicate that across grade levels, the Broad Reading Cluster for the WJ-R remained the same. Most correlations for the clusters for mathematics and written language were…

Finds that reading-disabled fifth-grade children were inferior to control groups in their ability to assign words to semantic categories, identify first phonemes in spoken words, and judge morphologic relationships between word pairs. Concludes that the developmental reading-disabilities syndrome includes a deficit in linguistic skills necessary…

Describes an activity that combines a first-grade class, a fifth-grade class, measurement activities, and gorillas in a zoo to extend the mathematics learning environment and include mathematical connections, problem solving, and communications. (MKR)