This investigation sought to identify the motivations that comprise teachers' agendas when leading student fieldtrips to science museums or similar sites. A survey distributed to upper elementary teachers resulted in a variety of open-ended responses that were analyzed and coded to identify recurring themes. In addition, ten teachers planning to…

The EFA Global Monitoring Report of 2002 contains two interesting paragraphs. In this article the author aims to explore what lies between those two paragraphs, in order to put forward some ideas about the role and future of literacy and its relation to human rights. The author hopes to show the continuing importance of adult literacy work and the…

The purpose of this study was to develop an understanding of adolescent use of instant messaging. Grounded in the New Literacy Studies stance that literacy is a social practice embedded in local contexts and informed by global ideologies (Street, 1995), I argue that participation in digital literacies such as instant messaging has implications for…

All cultures promote specific norms of behavior that can influence the assessment and intervention process with members of racially/ethnically diverse groups who are diagnosed with various forms of psychopathology. The purpose of this article is to highlight literature on the prevalence of psychological disorders with respect to children and…

The urban context generates a barrage of disorienting dilemmas for urban learners, thereby complicating and challenging the promotion of transformative learning. (Contains 1 table.)

Immigrant youth often rebuild their friendships and other social networks after arriving in a new country. The difficulties involved can threaten their psychosocial development. Formation of social networks needs to be understood within the macro sociocultural context that shapes the experience. Nonetheless, the current literature on social…

Prior research has shown that individuals living in the South express significantly less tolerant attitudes than the rest of the nation, while individuals residing in urban areas express significantly more tolerant attitudes than their rural peers. The authors seek to explain these generally unspecified Southern and urban effects by identifying…

This article examines the intersection of psychometrics and sociolinguists in the testing of English language learners (ELLs); it discusses language, dialect, and register as sources of measurement error. Research findings show that the dialect of the language in which students are tested (e.g., local or standard English) is as important as…

Pragmatics, the use of language in context, has been investigated only recently in the language used by children who stutter (CWS). Historically, researchers compared the length and complexity of the syntactic constructions produced by these children with those of children who do not stutter (CWNS) and generally found the CWS to be relatively…

English spelling is highly inconsistent in terms of simple sound-to-spelling correspondences but is more consistent when context is taken into account. For example, the choice between "ch" and "tch" is determined by the preceding vowel ("coach," "roach" vs. "catch," "hatch"). We investigated children's sensitivity to vowel context when spelling…

Research on epistemological beliefs has clearly increased in the last decade. Even though the construct is clearer and relevant data are being collected, there are important theoretical and methodological issues that need further clarification. One of them is the debate about the domain generality-specificity of epistemological beliefs. I argue…

We report 3 studies investigating children's and adults' interpretation of ambiguous focus in sentences containing the focus-sensitive quantifier only. In each experiment, child and adult participants compared sentences with only in a preverbal position and counterpart sentences without only against a series of pictures depicting events that…

The present study examined whether in humans the generalized matching law described the relation between relative responding and relative drug intake by humans under concurrent variable interval variable interval (conc VI VI) schedules of drug reinforcement. Methadone-maintained patients, stabilized on 80 mg per day of methadone, were recruited…

Binge drinking and alcohol-related problems among students at traditional 4-year universities have been well documented. However, little is known about the frequency of their such behaviors and its consequences among community college students, who comprise roughly 44% of all undergraduate students in the United States. The present study examined…

South African pupils performed well below the TIMSS international average in 1995 and 1999 and significantly below all other countries (including the other African countries) in the 1999 study. Path analysis, namely Partial Least Square (PLS) analysis, was applied to the South African TIMSS-R data to explore the effect of contextual factors at…