To examine the antecedents and consequences of social comparison exchanges of preschool children, this paper describes and analyzes several examples of such behavior. Data provide variegated descriptions of the social components of comparison behaviors in naturally occurring classroom contexts. (Author/RH)

Examines the issue of developmental consistencies between and within levels of moral reasoning, altruism, and perspective coordination. The relative contributions of perspective coordination and moral reasoning to altruistic behavior were examined in fifth grade. (Author/RH)

Examines various situations in which young children use social comparison to elicit understanding from a peer. Data are drawn from naturalistic observations of three- , four- , and five-year-olds. Children used social comparison to seek information, agreement, permission, compliance, verbal responsiveness, and attention. (Author/RH)

Examines the conditions under which children and adults use indexical words to refer to objects or to corefer with nouns in discourse. Subjects at three ages (6, 10, and adult) performed simple tasks and described their actions. (Author/AS)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of learning spelling words in context on 17 students in a third grade classroom. The students ranged from low to high ability in spelling. To investigate whether or not practicing spelling words in context has an effect on the learning of those words, students began the school year…

Facial responsiveness to pleasant and unpleasant odors was examined in 5- to 12-year-old children. Children failed to display reflex-like patterns, but exhibited facial configurations that varied according to odor and social condition. Results suggest that facial responsiveness to odors is flexible and able to reorganize and supports emotional and…

Three experiments involving 163 college students demonstrate that problem solvers use at least two sources of information to make operator selections in the building sticks task (adding and subtracting sticks to obtain a desired length): (1) information from their past history of using operators and (2) information from the problem's current…

Explores quantitative and Qualitative differences between context and word morphology as determinants of students' guesses of the meanings of novel kanji compounds. Japanese language learners interpreted unknown compounds consisting of familiar characters under three conditions. (Author/VWL)

Addresses the challenge of placing mathematics knowledge in context through a critical interpretation of math teaching and learning, discussion of what constitutes math knowledge, and examination of the effect of rural context. Presents principles for rural math education research, related to knowledge and context, the institution of schooling,…

This article discusses leadership contexts as they apply to school counseling. Outlines the activities and skills of each leadership context specific to school counseling, and provides an example of this holistic view of leadership as used by a school counselor. (Contains 39 references.) (GCP)

Compares narrative approaches to Kohlberg's theory of moral development along five dimensions: values relevance, legitimacy, universality, rationality, and commensurability. Argues that, contrary to Kohlberg's theory, narrative approaches may lead to contradiction in epistemology, nihilism in moral choices, and opportunism in relationships.…

Discussion of users of information retrieval systems focuses on a machine-learning approach to inferring the user's context in the Okapi system. Results of an evaluation experiment are given, and it is concluded that context learning can help information retrieval systems adapt to users' particular queries. (Author/LRW)

Children were presented with a related-word triplet (horse, pig, cow) with or without accompanying setting, or place, information (farm). Children were later given a retrieval cue from the first two words of the triplet and asked to recall the third word. Found that place information presented at acquisition and retrieval facilitated children's…

Investigated effects of sparse versus real contexts on understanding abstract mathematical concepts regarding the interpretation of linear graphs. Results of four experiments showed that a sparse context facilitated understanding of abstract concepts more than real contexts. Activation of abstract logic-mathematical knowledge structures was…

Examined whether context marked for grammatical gender can constrain the processing of homphone words in French. Homophones whose different meaning are associated with words of different genders were used in two cross-modal semantic priming experiments. (Author/VWL)