The study investigated the ability of 60 children, age 6-8, to monitor grammaticality in the past progressive, perfect progressive, and perfect verb forms. Children achieved a significantly higher rate of accurate judgments monitoring grammatical forms than ungrammatical forms. Context surrounding ungrammatical verb forms and child's age…

Investigates the influence of sentence context on the processing of concrete and abstract words. Results indicate that abstract words take longer than concrete to comprehend and to judge their meaningfulness when they occur in a neutral context. Concludes that this evidence supports the context availability model. (RS)

Leigh Burstein was an internationally recognized educational researcher and scholar. This tribute notes his determination to "get it right" in his studies of multilevel modeling, opportunity to learn, and development of educational indicator systems. His legacy includes the responsibility of "getting it right." (SLD)

Analyzes environmental chemistry courses taught at Princeton University. Discusses the importance of contextual and narrative linkages in teaching environmental chemistry. (JRH)

Two studies involving 195 undergraduates investigated memory errors occurring when the context standard used in judging target behaviors differs from the category norm standard available when behaviors are recalled. Results support a "natural" tendency to use the current categorical meaning of a judgment to reconstruct the referent of…

Resolution of serious behavior problems requires individual functional assessment of the events that predict and maintain the challenging behavior and identification of contextual factors that are relevant to effective behavioral support. Functional assessment can involve review of school records, interviews, rating scales, direct observation, and…

A theory of self-determination is presented in which concepts of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation are explicated and the innate psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness are discussed. A review of laboratory and field studies indicates the importance of social contexts that facilitate satisfaction of these basic…

The industrial age, by mechanizing production and reorganizing the workplace into large factory units, destroyed a pattern of life that saw living, working, and learning as a single interconnected entity. Conventional schooling, stressing abstract knowledge, has separated learning from the community and world of work. The new, higher order…

Cohesion analysis has been used to investigate the language of schizophrenics and that associated with other psychiatric syndromes. Cohesion, one means of creating text, cannot account for all aspects of the pretheoretical notion of coherence. As a research tool, cohesion meets the dual criteria of an analysis of language in context and…

Describes a comprehensive model of communication that incorporates four sets of relationships within a two-dimensional matrix: systems perspective (input, integration, output, feedback); rhetoric (purpose and method in objective and subjective perspectives); transactional process (simultaneous and multiple interactions among elements); and…

Discusses the interaction between children's minds and the learning environment, offering a conceptual framework that aims at creating authentic contexts where the quality and variety of mediated learning experiences will enable children to build a deep understanding within the domain studied. (MDM)

Difficulties in defining and examining ethnicity as a variable in psychological research are explored, and it is asserted that many problems in assessment research arise from not making explicit the assumptions underlying the use of ethnicity as an exploratory variable and from inadequately describing cultural and contextual characteristics of…

Argues that information designers can obtain a better understanding of users by using the contextual inquiry methodology, which involves conducting open-ended conversations with users while they perform their work. Notes that information designers using contextual inquiry depend on context, partnership, and focus to make design decisions. Relates…

Embedded a context effect experiment in a structured telephone survey of renal transplant recipients. Results indicated that context effects interacted with the treatment adherence status of respondents such that noncompliant recipients were less susceptible to context manipulations. Respondents' characteristics as potential moderators of item…

Investigated children's classroom sociometry and size of their best-friend networks. For both classroom and playground settings, popular children had the most reciprocal best friends, while rejected children had the fewest, but had more on the playground than in the classroom. Results suggest that constraints and opportunities of different…