As a former elementary library media specialist now in a new middle school library media center, it was frustrating for the author to not have enough time to assist students and discouraging to see the apathy that so many of the students displayed toward books and reading. Middle schoolers are busy with social activities, sports, and schoolwork.…

None of the techniques -- sorting, scatter graphs, grouping, or calculating means -- that are highlighted in this work are particularly sophisticated, and yet their simplicity is often more than adequate for displaying the trends in data or for making comparisons in a convincing way. These are strategies that are easy to introduce to students and…

Bowdle and Gentner (2005) proposed a reconciliation of the comparison and categorization models of metaphor comprehension. Their career of metaphor model posits that, as a metaphorical term becomes more conventional, its mode of processing shifts from comparison to categorization. However, other recent studies (Chiappe, Kennedy, & Chiappe, 2003;…

In this article, we explore one of the important peritextual features of picturebooks--the endpapers. In order to represent the rich diversity of form and function displayed by endpapers, we group examples along two dimensions: whether the endpapers are illustrated or unillustrated, and whether the front and back end papers are identical or…

A description on inquiry-based approach to teaching comparative vertebrate, skeletal morphology is presented that could be easily adapted to teach comparative morphology for any discipline, provided that sufficient physical models are available. This approach requires students to probe the material world for evidence that would allow them to…

Using data from recent national disability surveys in Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the United States, an international team of researchers coded indicators of several types of disability using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health. This article discusses the Disability Tabulations…

This article reviews three articles that add to the debate on the terminology that is used to represent people who are blind. It argues that authority is not limited to just one person or one organization, but is shared through an intertextuality, or utterance, of other authorities, and that conflict within blind discourse communities does not…

This article discusses issues of classification and identification, while evaluating some of the continuing controversies about learning disabilities (LD) related to those topics. The author suggests that many problems have to do with confusion between the two. Despite years of effort and an extraordinary increase in the number of individuals…

A recent overview of the field of learning disabilities (Torgesen, 2004) laid out several issues that will likely consume the field for the foreseeable future, including problems of definition and etiology, differentiation of learning disabilities from other disabilities, and issues in identification and service delivery. It has been approximately…

In 3 experiments, the authors tested performance in simple tone matching and classification tasks. Each tone was defined on location and frequency dimensions. In the first 2 experiments, participants completed a same-different matching task on the basis of one of these dimensions while attempting to ignore irrelevant variation in the other…

Forty participants assigned artificial creatures to categories after explicit rule instruction or feedback alone. Stimuli were typical and atypical exemplars of 2 categories with independent prototypes, conflicting exemplars sharing features of both categories, and "Others" with only 1 or 2 features of the well-defined categories. Ten…

J. P. Minda and J. D. Smith (2001) showed that a prototype model outperforms an exemplar model, especially in larger categories or categories that contained more complex stimuli. R. M. Nosofsky and S. R. Zaki (2002) showed that an exemplar model with a response-scaling mechanism outperforms a prototype model. The authors of the current study…

Many moments that humans see naturally suggest something other than themselves. This is a legacy from the remotest time. Among animals, movements of prey and predator give each an indication of what may happen next and a basis for choosing their own actions. As species evolved, the movements that could be made and the meanings that could be…

Young children are often thought to confuse fantasy and reality. This study took a second look at preschoolers' fantasy/reality differentiation. We employed a new measure of fantasy/reality differentiation--a property attribution task--in which children were questioned regarding the properties of both real and fantastical entities. We also…

The creator of an artifact, by virtue of having made the object, has privileged knowledge about its intended function. Do children recognize that the label an artifact's creator uses can convey this privileged information? 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with an object that looked like a member of one familiar artifact category, but which the…