Describes and analyzes how context acts as a resource for and a constraint upon the personal experience narratives of educators. Examines a teacher's story told in a support group for democratic educators. Illustrates the role that context has on storytelling, how teacher-narrators interpret/act upon context, and how context constrains a story.…

Reconceptualizes the role of the professional playleader, taking into account the contexts of children's development. Describes the growth of adventure playgrounds and playleadership in Europe. Discusses the responsibilities and attributes of the playleader, focusing on advocating for children's right to play. (KB)

A study examined how languages affect memory for narrative. Forty bilingual children aged 8-9 listened to a story in either English or Greek, and then retold it in English or Greek. Unexpectedly, children who heard the story in English and retold it in Greek had significantly better story recall than other groups. Educational implications are…

Surveys African American families (N=841) to test hypothesis that community context might influence the association between parent control and punishment on child conduct problems. Survey found the deterrent effect of caretaker control on conduct problems became smaller as deviant behavior became more widespread. Results suggest that a particular…

Suggests that the study of memory needs to be situated within broader conceptual and research contexts. Examines how four contexts accommodate memory phenomena: (1) knowledge; (2) comprehension; (3) context/function; and (4) strategy. Suggests that memories are best examined as knowledge structures resulting from efforts to understand, and that…

Argues that extant research assessing relations between contextual factors and psychological disturbance has confused two different roles of context. Suggests that environmental factors are nonspecific stressors and elicit psychopathology, with specificity of expressed psychopathology governed by individual differences, and that context is…

Discusses the differences between objectified and interpretive approaches to context. Suggests that in information needs and seeking research (INS), the former approach has been more common. One way of understanding INS phenomena is to define them as patterns of behavior; another way is to understand them as phenomena mediated by social and…

This study explored first graders' fraction learning when the teacher elicited and built on children's informal knowledge of fractions during discussions of equal-sharing tasks; the study focused on key classroom interactions resulting in cognitive change. Findings suggest that thinking about fractions is influenced by the structure of the child's…

Proposes a general model of communication that takes place during a musical performance and particularly focuses on the performer-listener communication path within this model. Explores whether the medium is the message, defines the medium and message as separate entities, and demonstrates the applicability of this notion within the realm of…

Discusses findings from this special issue on adolescent transition to university. Focuses primarily on how findings highlight the importance of context in youth development. Concludes that articles point to the importance of studying developmental processes in college-bound students while they are in secondary school. (Author/KB)

This study determined whether program setting (camp versus hotel) and program duration (five one-day sessions or a single five-day session) had any impact on development of teamwork in a corporate adventure training program. Results showed program setting had no effect, but short programs appeared to provide slower but greater overall gains in…

Presents the conceptual model underlying RELATE, a relationship evaluation instrument, and describes how this instrument can be used by instructors, clinicians, and therapists. The RELATE model contains measures of the four primary contexts of a couple's experience: the individual; the family; the culture; and the couple. Use of the instrument and…

This paper examines the co-constructed nature of classroom life, and what became constituted as one child's story of literacy learning in first grade. It takes an over-time look at how opportunities for literacy learning were constructed within multiple, intermingling contexts (classroom, school, district, and family). Derek's literacy learning…

This paper presents the major findings of a longitudinal study of teachers' professional identities in the early years of teaching. It analyzes key influences upon the ways in which new teachers' identities are shaped and reshaped over time. Through their own perceptions, analyses of the school cultures in which they work and their pupils' views…

This study used bilingual stories to examine the long-term memory of compound bilinguals in Grades 2 and 3. Results revealed that third graders used more elaborate memory strategies, had greater cognitive awareness of language, and demonstrated significantly better overall memory, relative to second graders. The author discusses memory development…