Reflecting the complexity of the early childhood education enterprise--classroom practice, teacher preparation, research, and conceptualization--this volume reflects an examination of the literature for illumination as to the value of early education theory and its usefulness to practice. The book has 10 chapters divided into three parts that…

Any model of reading must take into account the role of the language system in reading. Readers' subjectivities and the reading position taken up in a text can be explicated by demonstrating how texts function in context and how readers function in social situations to construct possible meanings. Components of this model include text and context…

Critical evaluation of instructional materials is an important but often neglected aspect of instructional preparation. This study proposes evaluation that is more theoretically grounded in sociocultural and context-sensitive bases than are many evaluation guides. A new instrument was developed and applied to materials for teacher education as…

Previous research has shown that, unlike novice physicians' performance, diagnostic quality of expert physicians improves when contextual information (the "Enabling Conditions") about a patient is available. The present study was designed to explore these findings further by systematically varying the typicality of enabling conditions…

This paper reports on a study of situational influences of affect and goal value on social problem-solving in middle childhood. It was expected that the adequacy of any particular social problem-solving process would be reduced by increases in goal intensity. On the basis of prior testing, two social goals of high value and two of low value were…

In spite of a mandate to create educational equality, the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) has not eliminated inequalities in school performance scores, and the problem may even be getting worse. The objective of this study is to determine the disparities that exist among Kentucky's eight Service Center regions. The analysis uses school…

Whether boys and girls perform differently on mathematics estimation items with a picture format (applied context [AC] items) compared with items with a numbers-only (NC) format was studied when effects of computational skill, conceptual knowledge, and quantitative ability were controlled. Subjects were approximately 80,000 students from grades 4…

This paper revisits the literature on the nature of school organizations and presents a view of secondary schools as complex social systems, as opposed to bureaucratic-rational structures. Research was conducted into three Western Australia secondary schools planning to implement school-based decision making and planning procedures. The…

This pilot study examines how a married couple with a small child integrates a 10 p.m. television news program into their weekday lives. The research focuses on how patterns of behaviors extend into television viewing, rather than how television programming influences beliefs, values, and behaviors. Ethnographic methods employed in the observation…

How an elementary school (pseudonym, Sunny Days Elementary School) initiated school restructuring using the School Restructuring Process Model developed by Charles Reigeluth was studied, using formative evaluation to see how the actual experiences of the school might refine and improve the model. The model follows a three-phase process from…

A major stumbling block for the implementation of Mexico's Global Development Plan has been the country's large rural population of Indians. One government strategy to integrate this sector into the mainstream of society has been to teach Spanish, the official language, as a second language, while at the same time fostering ethnic pride. The…

This study investigated the behavioral responses of eight children to five alternate lesson types. Barker's assertion of the coercive nature of setting was examined. Questions addressed were: (1) Do children having the same or similar lessons behave asimilarly or differently? (2) Do children change their patterns of behavior as they move from one…

Scientific advancements in cognitive science and instructional technology extend the behaviorally-oriented learning paradigm of instructional design and management in three major areas: (1) analysis of information-to-be-learned; (2) means of evaluating learners; and (3) linkage of learning theory to instructional prescriptions. The two basic types…

In this study, 242 adolescents were asked to indicate the likelihood that they would seek support from their mother, father, closest sibling, and closest friend when confronted with each of 24 common concerns. Mean scores were generated in eight specific and three general categories for all four target individuals. Mean scores for target…

Fifteen boys and 15 girls were interviewed during their seventh, ninth, and twelfth years about a friendship dilemma in which the protagonist had to decide whether to keep a promise given to a friend or to accept an invitation from a third child. Interviews assessed descriptive and prescriptive aspects of the differentiation and coordination of…