Information, activities, and ideas for implementing two summer reading programs are presented. For young readers, the "Adventures with Paddington Reading Club" program of the American Library Association (ALA), drawing on the popular character from children's fiction, is introduced; and materials are included for its use in local…

A survey was conducted of 50 school districts in the seven state region (Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin) to determine the types of support available to parents of children with disabilities and their satisfaction with these supports. Responses of 3,558 parents and guardians (11.9% of total sample) in 41 school…

This report was written to extend the findings of the Roger Tory Peterson Institute's 1990 forum on early-childhood environmental education. The report begins with an overview of Peterson's own childhood experiences that influenced his career as a naturalist. Peterson developed a hands-on interest in nature as a very young boy. His case is not…

This report summarizes the participation and achievement information provided by state educational agencies (SEAs) on the Education Consolidation and Improvement Act (ECIA) Chapter 1 Migrant Education Program, for the 1987-88 school year. The report provides information on the number of participants (by gender, year of birth, ethnic group, migrant…

Recent theory and research suggest that peer conflict contributes to children's development and represents an important form of social interaction. Research has identified structural features of children's conflict as issues, such as control of objects or physical space; strategies, including aggressive and nonaggressive physical and verbal…

This research review examines international studies on early childhood education and care, with particular reference to outcomes or benefits related to the child's age, the length of time in early childhood education and care, program type, and scope and type of parental involvement. Research literature from North America, Scandinavia, Britain,…

In order to investigate elementary school students' understanding of historical time, this study conducted open-ended interviews with 58 children in kindergarten through sixth grade. The students were asked to place nine illustrations from various periods of American history in chronological order and to talk about the reasoning behind the order…

A study examined the age-related differences in impersonal (objective) and personal (subjective) styles of thinking and the influences these differences have on traditional cognitive measures. Data were obtained from two 2-hour interviews with 333 participants in their homes, at senior centers, or on a university campus. All participants were…

This paper examines issues concerning access to health care for persons with disabilities, specifically the health status of the disabled, utilization and cost of services, and a comparison of health insurance coverage of persons with and without disabilities. Three age groups (children, working-age adults, and the elderly) are considered. Data…

The nature and strength of home and school environmental characteristics relating to attitudes of children in Ghana are investigated. A total of 200 second, third, fourth, and sixth graders randomly selected from 10 schools serving urban and rural areas participated in the study. Two instruments were used to collect data: the values and attitudes…

The purpose of this study was to investigate relationships between early family experiences of student teachers and observed teaching behaviors in preschool settings. A total of 109 students enrolled in teaching practicums at two locations completed a background information questionnaire. Subjects' teaching behaviors were noted by trained…

A study investigated the effects of preteaching vocabulary on students' performance of a writing task targeted to the use of those words. Subjects were 50 fourth grade and 55 sixth grade students. Materials included a pretest narrative writing assignment, a 10-word vocabulary pretest and posttest, a vocabulary instructional booklet with teacher's…

To examine the effect of structural factors on the development of story appreciation, a developmental model of story liking for suspense stories was tested by having second, fourth, and sixth grade children rate suspense stories on 10 affective scales. Specifically, the model predicted that (1) reader identification would increase with greater…

Two experiments investigated the effects of preceding sentence context on the naming times of sentence completion words in third-grade children and college students. In the first study subjects were shown incomplete sentences with four types of target words: best completions; semantically and syntactically appropriate, but less likely completions;…

A study was conducted to investigate issues related to the development of preschool children's self-definitions of attractiveness. Research questions were (1) At what ages can children state a self-definition of attractiveness? (2) Are self-definitions temporally stable? (3) To what degree are children's self-judgments similar to judgments made of…