In a rural community there is a risk that readers will not find connections to their own lives, which may affect the pleasure gained from reading. The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine the use of literature in a small rural elementary school, focusing on how sociocultural factors affect how students connect to and access literature.…

The current study evaluated the use of a manualized social skills program, Superheroes Social Skills, to increase the use of prosocial behaviors and decrease the use of aggressive behaviors for children with externalizing behaviors. The training was implemented by a school psychologist in a pullout group with four children with high-incidence…

This comparative study examined discourse and opportunities for interaction in two mathematics education methods classes, one face-to-face and one synchronous, online. Due to the content taught in the course, this study also sought to determine prospective mathematics teachers' understanding of variability and the role of discourse in each…

The purpose of the study was to analyze the science outreach program, Science In Motion (SIM), located in Mobile, Alabama. This research investigated what impact the SIM program has on student cognitive functioning and teacher efficacy and also investigated teacher perceptions and attitudes regarding the program. To investigate student…

This dissertation addresses the related questions of how online communication technologies affect communication in science and, more broadly, how new ways of interaction in online spaces affect how texts enact genres. Genres have been usefully thought of as typified discursive responses to recurrent social exigences, and much recent work has shown…

This study is based on 72 children's and young adult books that met the criteria of being about Muslims and published and circulated here in the U.S. They can be divided into the varied genres as 49 contemporary realistic fiction, 6 historical fiction, and 17 autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs. In-depth reading and coding were used to…

This article reports a synthesis of intervention studies conducted between 1994 and 2004 with older students (Grades 6-12) with reading difficulties. Interventions addressing decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension were included if they measured the effects on reading comprehension. Twenty-nine studies were located and synthesized.…

The objective of this study is to present "The Spiral Model for the Development of Coordination" (SMDC), a learning model that reflects the complexity and possibilities embodied in the learning of movement notation Eshkol-Wachman (EWMN), an Israeli invention. This model constituted the infrastructure for a comprehensive study that examined the…

This report describes the system used to code each segment of Square One TV for content analysis of all four seasons of production. The analysis is intended to aid in the assessment of how well Square One is meeting its three goals: (1) to promote positive attitudes toward, and enthusiasm for, mathematics; (2) to encourage the use and application…

This digest provides an introduction to content analysis, a systematic, replicable technique for compressing many words of a text into fewer content categories based on explicit rules of coding. This allows inferences to be made that can then be corroborated using other methods of data collection. In a technical sense, content analysis is not…

Describes how the College Board will stop flagging the scores of test-takers who were granted extra time on the SAT because of disabilities. (EV)

Proposes a new rule system and notation that supports the characterization of a document based on its structure or architecture (primarily linear, paper-copy media). Examples of the application of the notation are provided. (Author/JKP)

Analyzes the computational complexity of optimal binary tree pruning for tree-structured vector quantization. Topics discussed include the combinatorial nature of the optimization problem; the complexity of optimal tree pruning; and finding a minimal size pruned tree. (11 references) (LRW)

Discusses the minimum average codeword length coding under the constraint that the codewords are monotonically nondecreasing in length. Bounds on the average length of an optimal monotonic code are derived, and sufficient conditions are given such that algorithms for optimal alphabetic codes can be used to find the optimal monotonic code. (six…

Discusses the adaptive compression of computer files of numerical data whose statistical properties are not given in advance. A new lossless coding method for this purpose, which utilizes Adelson-Velskii and Landis (AVL) trees, is proposed. The method is effective to any word length. Its application to the lossless compression of gray-scale images…