One seventh-grade English language arts teacher engaged in teacher research in order to become a more understanding, responsive, and confident instructor. Systematic inquiry into her own practice revealed a conflict between what students perceived as their literacy needs and desires (discrete reading skills) with what she perceived to be important…

The main goal of the study was to map the difficulties and cognitive processes among adolescents (aged 13-21, N = 30) and adults (aged 25-66, N = 30) with mild and moderate intellectual disability (ID) when solving analogical problems. The participants were administered the "Conceptual and Perceptual Analogical Modifiability" test. A…

In this article, the author illustrates how the Descriptive Process can assist teachers in shifting relationships with students because it requires both associative and reflective processes. Drawing on discussions from a teacher study group, she illustrates how associative processes can lead to a strengthening of connection with self. Similarly,…

The Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20, 2010, and the subsequent release of oil into the Gulf of Mexico created an ecological disaster of immense proportions. The estimates of the amounts of oil, whether for the amount released per day or the total amount of oil disgorged from the well, call on numbers so large they defy the capacity of most…

The purpose of this investigation was to test the assumption of asymmetric mapping between words and concepts in bilingual memory as proposed by the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM, Kroll & Stewart, 1994). Twenty four Spanish-English bilinguals (experiment 1) and twenty English-Spanish bilinguals (experiment 2) were presented with pairs of words,…

Relatively little is known about the role of ambiguity in adult second-language learning. In this study, native English speakers learned Dutch-English translation pairs that either mapped in a one-to-one fashion (unambiguous items) in that a Dutch word uniquely corresponded to one English word, or mapped in a one-to-many fashion (ambiguous items),…

The study examined the effectiveness of a "story map," a questioning technique (Beck & McKeown, 1981) for improving students' understanding of literature. Though the story map idea was widely adopted as a student-initiated strategy, the original story map--a teacher-generated, postreading questioning framework--was never empirically tested. This…

To understand children's peer group affiliation, this study examined to what extent children in naturally occurring groups resemble each other on bullying, likeability, and perceived popularity. Participants were fourth- to sixth-grade pupils (N = 461). Peer groups were identified using the social cognitive map procedure. Resemblance on bullying,…

The key to improving student achievement isn't more teacher time--it's more teacher impact. But how do you decide which instructional practices will deliver the most bang for your buck? In this handbook, written for teachers but suitable for use by principals and instructional coaches, best-selling author Jim Knight presents the high-leverage…

Constructing a policy web of relationships is proposed as a useful way to identify and understand complex relationships between policies and their contexts. In Canada, the province of Ontario's "Character Development Initiative" (CDI) and its relationships to student achievement, citizenship education, and safe schools policies provide…

Developmental dyslexia is believed to involve a phonological deficit of which the exact properties have not been clearly established. This article presents the findings of a longitudinal case study that suggest that, at least for some people with dyslexia, the fundamental problem involves a disturbance of temporal-spatial ordering abilities. A…

Past experience is hypothesized to reduce computational demands in PFC by providing bottom-up predictive information that informs subsequent stimulus-action mapping. The present fMRI study measured cortical activity reductions ("neural priming"/"repetition suppression") during repeated stimulus classification to investigate the mechanisms through…

When children use objects like adults, are they simply tracking regularities in others' object use, or are they demonstrating a normatively defined awareness that there are right and wrong ways to act? This study provides the first evidence for the latter possibility. Young 2- and 3-year-olds (n = 32) learned functions of 6 artifacts, both…

Flexibility and productivity are hallmarks of human language use. Competent speakers have the capacity to use the words they know to serve a variety of communicative functions, to refer to new and varied exemplars of the categories to which words refer, and in new and varied combinations with other words. When and how children achieve this…

The present research examined whether 5- to 6.5-month-old infants would hold different expectations about various physical events involving a box after receiving evidence that it was either inert or self-propelled. Infants were surprised if the inert but not the self-propelled box: reversed direction spontaneously (Experiment 1); remained…