Canadian scholar Elizabeth Brule argues in her 2004 essay, "Going to the Market," that the corporatization of the university has led to the construction of students as rational, economic decision makers. As Brule argues, "The only choices considered rational, however, are those that increase one's employment opportunities within the strict…

The purpose of this study was to measure whether Christian programs had a positive influence on the academic achievement of low-literate male inmates. The sample consisted of 124 male inmates in a closed security prison in the southeastern United States who were participating in an Adult Basic Education (ABE) program. The researcher grouped the…

In this study, social constructionism provided a theoretical framework for investigating how students' struggles with reading are socially constructed in school literacy contexts, curriculum, and relationships. The study also sought to discover how "struggling reader" is a socially constructed subjectivity or identity that begins in the early…

This paper focuses on the experiences of British parents who have children identified with "special education needs" within mainstream education. Expectations of mainstream education can have a negative affect on parents when a child is unable to maintain his or her education within a mainstream school. In England and Wales,…

In an instructional message the contextual dominance is most often conveyed in the form of printed or spoken sentences. Within any sentence used in conjunction with a picture are nouns or phrases that directly relate to contextual elements within the picture. These are called referents since they refer to objects perceptible in the picture. This…

Stereotypically, anger is associated more with males than females, yet self-report and observational measures have not unequivocally revealed gender-related differences in anger expression. To explore this contradiction, male (n=21)and female (n=23) college students were asked to describe anger incidents they had witnessed that involved either a…

This study investigated whether language context affects language choice in a Spanish-English bilingual infant from age 1;3 to 1;10. Most studies of child bilingualism assume that communicative competence occurs at a stage in language development after the onset of syntactic constructions, but this paper hypothesizes that once the child begins to…

This paper summarizes an investigation of the format used for equating the 1993 Illinois Goal Assessment Program (IGAP) sixth grade reading test. In 1992, each student took only one test, either a narrative test or an expository test. In 1993, there was only one test, which included both formats. Several possible approaches for linking the 1993…

This paper presents a critical analysis of the forms of constructivism that owe their origin either directly or indirectly to Piaget's theory. The paper is organized into three sections. The first provides a brief synopsis of the structuralist assumptions underlying Piagetian theory and then demonstrates the ways in which these assumptions…

Two kinds of perspectives governing the provision and preservation of knowledge, a universal and an ecological perspective, are discussed in this paper. In the first case, scientific observations are represented through a semantic interpretation of facts. This is illustrated with a series of experiments on semantic feature perception in the recall…

Item parameter estimates vary for a variety of reasons, including estimation error, characteristics of the examinee samples, and context effects (e.g., item location effects, section location effects, etc.). Although we expect variation based on theory, there is reason to believe that observed variation in item parameter estimates exceeds what…

Empathy may have disappeared from official documents but the history teacher who does not still regularly think about it, plan for it and teach it would be hard to find. What is history if not, in part, an attempt to understand how people thought and felt in the past? This is not to deny, however, that the criticisms levelled at empathy-type tasks…

Suggests that teachers should foster situations where text, readers, and teacher can meet in collaborative ways. Identifies four reading research categories focusing on different contexts that surround the reading act. (MM)

Compares the behavior of mothers to their own infants at three- to four- and nine- to 10-months of age in five of the societies described in previous chapters: Gusii of Kenya, Yucatec Mayan of Mexico, Italian, Swedish, and suburban Bostonian. Reveals differences between agrarian and urban-industrial societies, as well as culture-specific patterns…

A number of studies have found that essays are scored higher when preceded by poor quality scripts than when preceded by good quality scripts. This study investigated the effects of scoring procedures designed to reduce the influence of context. Context effects were found irrespective of the scoring procedure used. (Author/PN)