A project designed and implemented a framework of conceptually oriented reading instruction to foster students' amount and breadth of reading, intrinsic motivations for reading, and strategies of search and comprehension. The framework emphasizes five phases of reading instruction in a content domain: observing and personalizing, searching and…

This document describes a project to develop a series of multi-disciplined arts lessons intended to enhance the social studies curriculum for fifth grade classes in Salina (Kansas) public schools. The lessons were developed by a team of elementary classroom teachers, artists, and representatives of Salina community cultural organizations. The…

A practicum addressed the significant difference between the reading comprehension levels of gifted students and their ability to demonstrate achieved levels on exams designed to measure these levels. Nineteen fifth-grade students participated in daily timed activities targeting reading comprehension, reading rate, attitudes towards test taking,…

An action research project studied the attitudes and achievement of low-achieving fifth-grade students after participating in a 1-year heterogeneously grouped, literature-based reading program. The project explored the changes in student attitudes towards reading, and changes in students' knowledge in comprehension and vocabulary development.…

Western society sees art as beautiful, well crafted objects; and art education derives almost its entire theory and practice from this concept. However, this is only one function of the creative process and art educators need to reconsider the fullness and depth of the usage of that process and provide an alternative mission and practice of art…

This 2-year study examined the relative potency of locus of control (LOC) and motivational orientation (MO) as predictors of standardized achievement scores and learned helplessness. Also tested was the prediction that children with an extrinsic MO would be prone to adopt an external LOC over time. In the first year of the study, subjects were 158…

A preliminary study was conducted to investigate strategies that elementary teachers and students use in responding to requests and to determine whether strategy use varies with request imposition. Subjects were 26 fifth-grade students drawn from six classes in one school district and 17 fourth- or fifth-grade teachers from the same district.…

Through a Chicago Public School Program fifth-grade students from different cultures and backgrounds were brought together to experience and learn about a forest environment. These urban students (N=269) completed a brief questionnaire about their previous experiences, perceptions, and expectations regarding forest resources. Findings indicate…

This article discusses the author's use of a performance-based evaluation in his fifth grade Spanish class in a K-5 public elementary school located in Princeton, New Jersey. The author realized the need to break the old testing paradigm and discover a new way of demonstrating student language acquisition since the traditional tests did not seem…

This instructional unit designed to develop higher-level cognitive skills in fifth grade students focuses on a mid-nineteenth century newspaper from the Old Stater Print Shop. Purposes include: (1) to compare and contrast a century-old newspaper with a modern-day paper; (2) to begin planning for a newspaper and to organize a newspaper staff; (3)…

Faced with a market that puts a premium on newness, artwork, and copyright date, the textbook industry seems to have been forced into a hectic textbook revision cycle in which improvement in instructional quality takes a poor second place to more superficial changes. While educators think they are getting newer, different, and, therefore better…

To understand more fully how students' usable knowledge about writing is activated by texts, a study examined how the manipulation of specific text characteristics in the constructed texts influences the verbalization of evaluative criteria. Twenty-seven fifth grade students from a predominantly rural middle school in the southeastern United…

This classroom research project focused on 10 fifth-grade students, all of whom had been labelled low-average achievers by their school. Students were encouraged to read, write, draw, talk, tell stories, and play freely. Five case studies emerged from the interactions. It became apparent that the children were shaping literature to their…

The Drug Resistance Education (DARE) program is designed to prevent drug abuse in Hawaii's children and youth. The program is currently conducted in fifth grade classrooms by uniformed Honolulu Police Department officers. As a primary prevention program, the DARE program is directed at reducing drug abuse incidence rates by targeting total-school…

A study examined students' metacognitive response to ambiguous literacy tasks to determine the relationship between that response and academic achievement. Subjects were 11 students chosen from a fifth-grade classroom in a small, urban school serving a predominantly black, middle class neighborhood. Two literacy tasks were identified as ambiguous:…