To account for coercive force in questions posed by counsel to defendants and witnesses, several levels of speech must be addressed. Forensic linguistics literature discusses the scale of coerciveness as reflected in the syntactic form of the questions. It is argued that this type of analysis fails to account for the inferences made by hearers…

In this study, a Delphi Method was used to collect and collate opinions of 24 Alberta child care professionals regarding the creation of a research agenda on child care. Findings indicated that the 25 research questions (out of an original list of 80 questions) considered important or very important by at least three-quarters of the participants…

All language teachers, even those committed to teaching language in context, must occasionally provide examples of grammatical or syntactic structures. When searching for effective examples, teachers can evaluate them by asking the following questions: (1) Considering the context and content, is the use of the target structure appropriate?; (2)…

A study tested the effects of timed versus untimed practice using text passages containing inserted adjunct questions. These effects were measured in terms of performance on repeated, related, and unrelated test questions. Subjects were 47 college students in Florida randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group was allowed a fixed amount of…

The effects of four different instructional presentations of identical content on the achievement of 72 gifted seventh graders were evaluated. Ss were randomly assigned to four treatments, each with one replication: (1) independent study, (2) lower-order questions, (3) higher-order questions, and (4) divergent-production questions. Eight teachers…

Story length and plausibility were varied to see whether these factors significantly affect children's ability to monitor their comprehension. A total of 19 third graders and 25 sixth graders were individually read four stories in a counterbalanced order. Each story had one of the following sets of characteristics: long, low plausibility; short,…

Activities designed to improve student questioning techniques are described. For journal availability see annotation SO 504 171. (DE)

The scientific method and questionning techniques are the basis for a beginning program of descriptive research for elementary students. (JR)

The author describes a game in which students must determine by asking a small number of questions which of 24 attribute blocks has been chosen. The activity is appropriate for primary children using blocks to keep track of answers, or for older students working mentally. (SD)

This article argues for and provides suggestions for new directions in law-focused education at the elementary level. An examination of legal education, criticisms of legal education, the practice of law itself, and children's thinking about law can supply these directions. (Author/JR)

Two studies examined the effectiveness of a model designed as an instructional aid in teaching college students how to respond to potentially discriminatory employment interview questions. Subjects in the first study, 91 students enrolled in communication classes in a mid-size Wisconsin university who were told that they would be asked to respond…

Inquiry teaching forces students to actively engage in articulating theories and principles that are critical to understanding a domain. Inquiry teachers have three distinct goals: (1) to help students construct a given theory or set of principles; (2) to help students construct novel theories or principles; and (3) to teach students how to pose…

In their efforts to understand the grammar of English as a second language, students often confuse the two roles that grammatical elements play: form and function. A classroom technique for helping students distinguish between the two is to create playful analogies for specific structures, in which students must use reasoning to determine the form…

To investigate prediction as a strategy that can improve reading comprehension, 50 third grade students from Toledo, Ohio, were first divided into experimental and control groups. The 2 groups both read the same 5 basal stories for instruction, were given the same pretest passages, answered 10 comprehension questions, and then followed a 3-day…

This brief review of research examines the mail questionnaire as a research tool. Major topics reported are the advantages and disadvantages of mail surveys response rates, and questionnaire construction. Among the advantages reported are ease of distribution and tabulation, the possibility of a large sample and geographic range, low cost,…