Teachers' beliefs about science reform have an important effect on how science is taught. This article examines a kindergarten teacher's science curriculum as she seeks to implement five of Washington State's Essential Academic Learning Requirements (EALRs) for core concepts and principles of science. The authors examine factors that affect…

Background: Children who have poor vocabulary knowledge are at risk of wider language weaknesses and reading comprehension difficulties, which will impact upon their educational achievement. The central question addressed in this paper is how best to teach new vocabulary items to these children. Aims: To investigate the effects of two different…

In this article, the author describes how she maintains student interest with the use of advanced technology. The author is currently using an assessment tool in her classroom--the Classroom Performance System (CPS)--that actually brings cheers from her students. The CPS provides an objective way to measure student understanding by using…

This article reports on the third year of a three-year longitudinal investigation into six secondary students' understanding of optics at a secondary school level. In the third year of this investigation the students, who by now were in Year 12, underwent a teaching sequence that centred on the teaching and learning of physical optics and quantum…

This study compared two approaches for teaching a history unit on the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1965) to middle school students with learning disabilities (LD) in general education settings. The curriculum was designed to make the content challenging, but accessible. The major text was the documentary, Eyes on the Prize (DeVinney, 1991).…

Graphic novels help all different types of learners. For children who are incapable of visualizing a story, the artwork helps them create context. Graphic elements also attract visually dependent readers, who then freely read the text, and help reluctant readers understand the plot of a story. Finally, graphic novels cross gender lines. In this…

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the applicability of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory and the concept of dynamic assessment to the problem of assessing reading comprehension in English as a third language (L3). The study was conducted with immigrant students from Ethiopia studying at pre-academic centers in Israel. The assessment procedure…

In this article, the author discusses how to stop running out of time for writing across the curriculum and features the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory that helps low-performing schools improve writing by incorporating writing instruction across the curriculum. The Southwest Educational Development Laboratory's systemic work to…

In a case study, I applied philosophical hermeneutic principles in an advanced level EFL writing class in Taiwan. A "fusion of horizons" occurs at the junction of two intertwined interpretations: one from our socio-historical tradition and the other from our experience of novel phenomena. I explored students' hermeneutic horizons in…

A new measure of reading comprehension, the Diagnostic Assessment of Reading Comprehension (DARC), designed to reflect central comprehension processes while minimizing decoding and language demands, was pilot tested. We conducted three pilot studies to assess the DARC's feasibility, reliability, comparability across Spanish and English,…

We are delighted to welcome you to the International Psychological Applications Conference and Trends 2013, taking place in Madrid, Spain, from 26 to 28 of April. Our efforts and active engagement can now be rewarded with these three days of exciting new developments about what we are passionate about: Psychology and its connections. We take pride…

The study reviews translation validated tests and proposes a process-oriented translation test for assessing basic translation skills for freshmen English majors at the faculty of Education. The proposed test is developed based on the process approach to translating and translation teaching, and is confined to translation from English to Arabic.…

In this technical report, the authors describe the development alternate forms of Word and Passage Reading Fluency measures as part of a comprehensive progress monitoring literacy assessment system developed in 2006 for use with students in Kindergarten through fourth grade. They begin with a brief overview of the two conceptual frameworks…

First published in 2007. The focus of this book is on the cognitive processes involved in comprehension, and moreover, on techniques that help readers improve their ability to comprehend text and it is also on reading comprehension strategies. Indeed, the use of effective reading comprehension strategies is perhaps the most important means to…

This study offers an alternative to traditional notions of scaffolding for reading comprehension by tracing the evolution of a fifth-grade small group literature conversation in which the teacher sought to displace himself as "primary knower" (Berry, 1981) in the conversation. The study examines how the teacher shared evaluation with his…