The use of logos in the early childhood classroom is one aspect of a rich written language environment in which the young child can begin to acquire literacy in a meaningful way. The early childhood classroom provides many opportunities for the use of logos in context. Sociodramatic play provides one such opportunity. Whether the play is arranged…

Black and white middle class preschool children were compared on the frequency with which they engaged in functional, constructive, and dramatic cognitive play across interactive and noninteractive social play situations. Results of analyses yielded no significant racial differences on the cognitive play types across interactive and noninteractive…

Aspects of chess relevant to certain educational issues are explored. Based on findings from a sample of about 50 children from 6 to 18 years of age, discussion focuses on (1) how children play chess and how the process of acquiring expertise differs among children and adults, (2) chess training techniques and why they are effective with children,…

All incidents of crying that occurred in a preschool setting were recorded along with the responses of other children and teachers. After pilot observations had been carried out for 3 hours at each of 20 preschool and day care centers, detailed observations were made at a single site, four hours per day, twice a week, from late fall to mid-spring.…

In the United States, the illiterate or functionally illiterate population has been estimated at somewhere between 7 and 73 million people. This range is primarily due to variables such as definitions of literacy, methods of survey research, and the researcher's unique perspective. Literacy is traditionally defined using some criteria relating to…

The effect of verbal contextual information on junior high school students' categorization of differences among photographic art was examined. Photographs of varying levels of abstraction were presented to the viewers both with and without correct and erroneous titles that referred to descriptive or interpretive information. Twelve students…

This paper argues that metaphor comprehension is an interactive process that involves reliance not only on the metaphorical linguistic input but also on the linguistic and situational context in which it occurs. A pilot study indicated that even preschool children appear capable of using the information provided by the linguistic and situational…

Mothers' behavioral intentions about using physical punishment were examined to reveal influences on their selection of responses to child misbehaviors. Participants were 55 middle-class, mostly college-educated mothers of 3-to-4-year-old children. A total of 31 children were girls. Mothers operated a computer program which presented, in a random…

The "contextual hypothesis" of French and Brown (1977) concerning children's acquisition of temporal terms was tested. French and Brown claimed that it would be impossible for children to learn the meaning of temporal terms except by hearing them used in contexts where they referred to already known sequences, and further proposed that the terms…

The moral judgments of 22 parochial school second graders and 20 public school children of similar age and intelligence were compared in this study. The children were read 12 moral judgment stories of either negative intention and positive consequence or positive intention and negative consequence. Story content included either damage to personal…

Describes children's views of the contexts surrounding their writing and examines five contextual factors: ownership, setting, audience, purpose, and genre.

The testlet, a bundle of test items, alleviates some problems associated with computerized adaptive testing: context effects, lack of robustness, and item difficulty ordering. While testlets may be linear or hierarchical, the most useful ones are four-level hierarchical units, containing 15 items and partitioning examinees into 16 classes. (GDC)

Discusses three facets of reading-writing relationships: (1) the processes underlying reading and writing; (2) the communicative contexts influencing reading and writing; and (3) the learning outcomes derived from reading and writing, including the influence of reading upon writing and writing upon reading. (MM)

Third- and fifth-graders, like adults, quickly named words preceded by either an incongruous or a normal incomplete sentence. Results (1) support the assumption that context effects on children's word recognition are caused by spreading-activation and expectancy-based-attentional processes operating simultaneously and (2) indicate that word…

This paper highlights an attempt by two grade 8 teachers, Bulelwa and Kevin, to draw in the everyday in the teaching of mathematics. Though located in different South African contexts and settings, both teachers tend to enable their learners' access to mathematics by rendering the everyday inauthentic. I argue that inauthenticating the everyday is…