Writing is a powerful social tool that offers students opportunities to chisel their identities as they position themselves and others on issues and beliefs (Dyson, 1992). This article presents the story of how Mark, a fifth-grade student who resisted writing in certain classroom contexts, used positional writing practices to shape his identities.…

Many test-based accountability systems, including the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), place great weight on the numbers of students who score at or above specified proficiency levels in various subjects. Accountability systems based on these metrics often provide incentives for teachers and principals to target children near current…

This paper presents the methodology and main results of a longitudinal study in Greece that explored the learning and psychosocial difficulties of immigrant pupils, as compared with those of their Greek classmates. The "Teacher-Child Rating Scale" (T-CRS) and "Child Rating Scale" (CRS) were used as instruments to measure the…

Emerging from a human constructivist view of learning and a punctuated model of conceptual change, these studies explored differences in the structural complexity and content validity of knowledge about prehistoric life depicted in concept maps by learners ranging in age from approximately 10 to 20 years. Study 1 (cross-age) explored the…

The authors' goals in the study were to investigate the possible gains made by including multiple assessments of status in the prediction of change in psychosocial adjustment and to compare the effectiveness of continuous and categorical measures of peer status in predicting adjustment. The authors obtained continuous and categorical measures of…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention program aimed to develop fair play behaviours in a school Olympic Education program. One hundred and twenty six, 5th-grade students from 4 elementary schools participated in this study, 66 of which were in the experimental group and 60 in the control group. The results…

Theories of positive youth development (PYD) regard such development as bases of both community contributions and lessened likelihood of risk/problem behaviors. Using data from the 4-H Study of PYD, we tested these expectations by examining if PYD in Grade 5 predicted both youth contributions and risk behaviors and depression in Grade 6. Results…

This study examines the historical understanding of 22 fourth-graders and 11 fifth-grade students in two classrooms in a suburban community near Cincinnati (Ohio). The classes were homogeneous racially, with no students of Hispanic, African-American, Asian, or Pacific Island descent in either class. The school reflects primarily middle and…

Two pilot studies of a new science program called WEE Science were conducted in fifth-grade classrooms. The pilots lasted for 7 days in one of the classrooms and 9 days in the other. At the beginning of the program the students chose a science tradebook from among the many that the researchers, teachers, and librarians had selected and brought to…

One framework for conceptualizing the study of classroom effects on student motivation asserts that students' perceptions of the classroom environment mediate the relationship between teacher practices and student performance outcomes. This study examined within- and between-classroom effects on 356 fifth-grade students' perceptions of the quality…

This study examines the ability of students to develop empathy for peoples of the past and to avoid the belief that people in the past were no different than today. The paper reports the results of a year-long qualitative investigation of fourth and fifth graders' attempts to understand the values, attitudes, and beliefs of people in the past. The…

This report describes a cross-age tutoring program implemented to improve reading comprehension skills in a group of regular students in a rural elementary school. A targeted group of four fifth-grade students and four second-grade students were matched for cross-age tutoring sessions. The students developed reading comprehension skills through…

This study explored 330 third- and fifth-grade Maryland students' motivation to read using the Motivation to Read Profile (MRP). The first part of the MRP, a Likert-type, self-report, group-administered questionnaire, was completed by all students. The second part of the MRP, the Conversational Interview, was individually administered to a random…

In order to assess preteen activities in a moderate sized community in Georgia, selected group of classroom teachers conducted a pilot study. A questionnaire was developed and distributed to approximately 1,000 fifth-grade children and the results are presented here. It was discovered that Blacks, more than Whites, and boys, more than girls,…

The influence of word recognition and conceptual knowledge on readers' comprehension of narrative text has become a fundamental assumption associated with text processing in the primary grades. Features of conceptual knowledge such as prior knowledge, content knowledge, domain knowledge, and discourse knowledge are believed to be significant…