Describes students' work during a 12-week course on fantasy offered to talented and gifted high school students. Illustrates how the students learned about metaphor and inference. (SRT)

Investigates, using eight scenarios, children making inferences about memory from incomplete knowledge and children varying in what they judge as relevant information in their schema. Showed that older children are less likely than younger ones to invoke an inferential schema when making memory judgements. (Author/BB)

Investigates several variables' effects on children's inferential processes, including cause of target event, presence and timing of questions prior to recall, and inference type that the questions demanded. Children four and seven differed in logical, constrained, and unconstrained inference production; causal connections between story events…

Young and older nursery school children were taken to three locations in their school and asked to point to five targets on the school grounds. Older children were more accurate than younger children, but children's spatial representations were relatively nonintegrated at both age levels. Consistent sex differences in favor of males were found.…

Argues that making inferences is an integral part of reading comprehension. Presents classroom strategies based on current research that encourage inference skill development. (FL)

Test-based educational accountability systems have considerable appeal to politicians, policymakers, and the general public. Such systems have been widely used by states for more than a decade and with the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 all states must now implement an accountability system that uses results from assessments in…

In this lesson plan, middle school students analyze the structure of a postmodern picture book to uncover how authors form relationships between words and illustrations. An online teacher resource explains the intent of the picture book "Black and White" and provides background information and suggestions for classroom discussion. During one…

Evaluated three test development procedures designed to measure different levels of domain expertise. Experts and novices in psychology and physics took tests generated by the procedures intended to measure ability to understand, draw inferences from, and recognize "big ideas" in technical text. Results were consistent with the…

A fun logic game to introduce several classes of sixth-graders to advanced mathematical thinking allows even students who previously fared poorly in math to arrive at the destination with their peers. (Author/MLF)

Notes that comprehension problems can be difficult to detect and treat. Suggests that comprehension instruction should be more tailored to the needs of the individual. Explains that strategy instruction allows the teacher to model and assist students to use a range of reading strategies. Offers suggestions for catching students' reading problems…

Examined children's naturally occurring arguments sampled from transcripts of discussions in fourth-grade classrooms. Found that children's arguments had vague referring expressions, sometimes did not contain explicit conclusions, and seemed to lack explicit warrants to authorize conclusions. Missing or oblique information was usually given in the…

Suggests ways for using data from championship tennis as a means for exploring probabilistic models, especially binomial probability. Examples include the probability of winning a service point and the probability of winning a service game using data from tables and graphs. (AIM)

The concept of consequential validity wrongly links the idea of the consequences of test use with the idea of validity, widely held to be rooted in the accuracy of inferences drawn from examinees' test performances. The reification of consequential validity can distract from a needed clarity about test use consequences. (SLD)

Developments in cognitive and developmental psychology have broadened the inferences researchers want to make about students' learning and the nature and acquisition of knowledge. The principles of inference that led to standard test theory can support inference in the broader context of the cognitive revolution. (SLD)

Examines how native and second-language English speakers interpret reflexive anaphores and pronominals in certain sentence types. Interpreting anaphores was more difficult overall and a consistent order of difficulty was found for five different sentence types. Results are discussed in the context of the Parameterized Binding Theory and the Subset…