Questions regarding the value of standardized testing have been raised by community and school leaders, as well as parents and members of the media. Some have expressed concern that children today are placed under such pressure to perform well on standardized tests that the anxiety adversely affects performance outcomes. This study examined the…

Recent debates about the utility of teacher education have raised questions about whether certified teachers are, in general, more effective than those who have not met the testing and training requirements for certification, and whether some candidates with strong liberal arts backgrounds might be at least as effective as teacher education…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of multicultural music instruction on classroom learning outcomes. Fifth-grade children (10-11 years of age; N = 170) from four schools were randomly assigned to one of two instructional treatments: music concept and sociocultural context. The former approach used formal elements of music as a…

Grammatical priming of picture naming was investigated in Kiswahili, which has a complex grammatical noun class system (a system like grammatical gender), with up to 15 noun classes that have obligatory agreements on adjectives, verbs, pronouns and other parts of speech. Participants heard a grammatically agreeing (concordant), nonagreeing…

Four teachers and their eight classes of 179 fifth-grade (10-11-year-old) students participated in this quasi-experimental classroom study, which investigated the effects of form-focused instruction (FFI) and corrective feedback on immersion students' ability to accurately assign grammatical gender in French. The FFI treatment, designed to draw…

This article describes the application of experimental analysis methods for identifying reading fluency interventions for two elementary school students (fourth and fifth grade) referred for reading problems. For each student the experimental analyses examined use of rewards, instruction, and a treatment package containing both reward and…

This study examined the effects of providing explicit metacognitive instruction prior to cognitive strategy instruction on students' with learning disabilities ability to generalize a vocabulary strategy learned in a special education setting to a general education setting. The subjects were eight elementary school students with learning…

This study examined the performance of one hundred thirty-one fifth graders on timed versus untimed mathematics tests. Measures of math fluency and calculation were administered. Low achieving students performed poorly on both calculation and math fluency. Normally achieving children performed within the average range on both calculation and math…

Relationships among attributions for success and failure and depression were investigated for 63 5th-grade students. Significant relationships were found among school-based attributions, as measured by global scale scores from the Student Academic Attribution Scale (SAAS) and the Student Social Attribution Scale (SSAS), general attributions as…

Purpose: To assess the impact of a school-based toothbrushing intervention aimed at encouraging primary school children to brush their teeth daily at school, on cognitions, toothbrushing behaviour and habit strength. Design/methodology/approach: The effects of an intervention were examined in a quasi-experimental trial among 296 fifth-graders in…

This quasi-experimental study compared the effects of morphemic and contextual analysis instruction (MC) with the effects of textbook vocabulary instruction (TV) that was integrated into social studies textbook lessons. The participants were 157 students in eight fifth-grade classrooms. The results indicated that (a) TV students were more…

This study investigated the orthographic and phonological coding strategies of students with symmetrical and asymmetrical reading and spelling achievement. Based on performance on a standardized achievement test, fourth-and fifth-grade students (N = 50) were classified as having no difficulties with reading and spelling, difficulties with both…

Through an interactive partnership, fifth-grade students collected data on plants and joined an active scientific community of working scientists. This Web-based Integrated Science Environment (WISE) project involved asking questions about plants, growing plants in the classroom, and discussing their data with scientists online. (Contains 5…

This chapter focuses on the moderating role of inimical peer relationships in the association between community violence exposure and children's functioning difficulties. A series of hierarchical regression analyses demonstrated that community violence exposure is consistently related to psychosocial maladjustment only for children who are…

A cognitive lab technique (n=156) was used to investigate interactions between individual factors and item factors presumed to affect assessment validity for diverse students, including English language learners. Findings support the concept of "access"--an interaction between specific construct-irrelevant item features and individual…