The present study extends 8 years of previous research using Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), a set of comprehension strategies designed to improve understanding of expository text. We examined teachers' year long implementation of CSR. Five intervention and five control teachers from five schools participated along with their students.…

The paper reports on a study among primary-school students of the process of deriving word meaning from written context in a first language. A sequential analysis of think-aloud protocols revealed that the students inferred one or more meanings, checked their inferences and then rejected or accepted them. These activities were performed in a…

Eighty-four 24- and 30-month-old children were tested with two analogy tasks: formal and problem solving. Experiment 1 included three Groups: relations specified, relations unspecified, and associative control (no exposure to base relations). In Experiment 2 the relation that linked that a- and b-terms in formal problems was explicitly shown in…

Gygax, Oakhill and Garnham (2003) showed that, contrary to the assumption of earlier research, readers do not infer specific emotions such as "guilt" or "boredom". This paper presents evidence for the non-specificity of emotional inferences regardless of the nature of the stories. In Experiment 1 and 2, Gygax et al.'s stories were made longer. In…

A total of 153 children (excluding those who erred on control questions), mainly 5 and 7 years of age, participated in two experiments that involved tests of false belief. In the task, the sought entity was first at Location 1 and then, unknown to the searching protagonist, it moved to Location 2. In Experiment 1, performance was well below…

This working paper explores contemporary research related to methods for teaching reading in Spanish and English in bilingual, foreign language, and English as a second language (ESL) classrooms. Changes stemming from innovations in research and learning are identified and a table is provided to compare methods of teaching reading in Spanish and…

REL Southwest received a request to review the report "Avoidable Losses: High Stakes Accountability and the Dropout Crisis" to assess the soundness of the study methodology and the appropriateness of the conclusions drawn in the report. The review found that conclusions drawn in this study cannot be generalized and are significantly…

The role of grammatical knowledge in inferencing word meaning has not received proper attention in L2 research. Addressing this issue, the present paper provides research-based and introspective think-aloud data to examine the contribution of grammatical knowledge to inferencing the meaning of unknown words. It addresses (a) the effects of…

Depression commonly co-occurs with anxiety and externalizing problems. Etiological factors from a central cognitive theory of depression, the Hopelessness Theory (Abramson et al. "Psychological Review," 96, 358-372, 1989), were examined to evaluate whether a negative inferential style about cause, consequence, and self interacted with stressors…

This article contains the results of how a selected group of Finnish upper secondary students understand Lutheranism. The data consisted of 63 students' responses to a writing task together with complementary interviews of 11 students. The outcomes of phenomenographic analysis of variation in the students' understanding of Lutheranism are…

This article discusses the evidence for intervention validity of Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) in designing support for students with intensive behavioral needs. Since its inclusion into the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act nearly a decade ago, FBA has been the subject of significant research investigating its use and…

In this study, the authors tested the viability of the expanded nigrescence (NT-E) model as operationalized by Cross Racial Identity Scale (CRIS) scores using confirmatory factor analyses. Participants were 594 Black college students from the Southeastern United States. Results indicated a good fit for NT-E's proposed six-factor structure.…

There has been growing interest in comparing achievement goal orientations across ethnic groups. Such comparisons, however, cannot be made until validity evidence has been collected to support the use of an achievement goal orientation instrument for that purpose. Therefore, this study investigates the measurement invariance of a particular…

We report a case study that explored how three college students mentally represented the knowledge they held of inferential statistics, how this knowledge was connected, and how it was applied in two problem solving situations. A concept map task and two problem categorization tasks were used along with interviews to gather the data. We found that…

This paper contributes empirically to the literature on peer effects in first-grade classrooms. The paper examines peer effects on academic achievement among first graders randomly assigned to their classrooms and to their teachers as part of Tennessee's Project STAR, America's largest ever education experiment. The analysis draws on previously…