The authors conducted an ethnography investigating children's lived experiences in a 3-day residential environmental education (EE) program with 20 gifted 4th- and 5th-grade students. The authors also conducted participant observation and a series of interviews before, during, and after the trip. After the authors conducted the interviews and…

Many schools and school districts are implementing sheltered instruction to help serve the needs of English Language Learners (ELLs) in mainstream content-area classes. Sheltered instruction is a research-based instructional framework that provides clear and accessible content and academic language to ELLs in pre-K-12 grade-level classes. Programs…

This paper presents an action research approach to exploring methods of improving the learning styles and outcomes of first year university students within large class environments. The genesis of this project stemmed from an observation that entire tutorial groups were often lethargic in their approach to learning. Following a survey of learning…

To know the age effects in foreign language learning for children in China, we made both qualitative survey on the English teachers, the students and their parents by means of questionnaire; and quantitative survey on the students' scores from junior 1 to senior 2 (5 years) in the secondary school by analyses between those (over 30 students) who…

Accounting educators struggle with ways to incorporate the development of critical thinking and communication skills into the curriculum. Case analysis is one tool for developing these skills. We examine whether students' case analysis scores improve as a result of participation in peer grading and peer review. We find that students improve their…

The ability to apply existing knowledge in new situations and settings is clearly a vital skill that all students need to develop. Nowhere is this truer than in the rapidly developing world of Web-based learning, which is characterized by non-sequential courses and the absence of an effective cross-subject guidance system. As a result, questions…

Federal and state policies have long sought to address the social inequities faced by limited English proficient (LEP) students through the improvement of English language acquisition. English language acquisition policy has focused on access to resources, qualified teachers, and instructional methodologies (e.g. pedagogy) that create a learning…

This study explores the effects of school-level characteristics on North Carolina students' reading and math achievement from fourth through eighth grade, focusing on the relationships between achievement and the racial and poverty composition of schools. After creating race-by-poverty cohorts of schools, I use multilevel models to examine math…

Arguing that Mother Goose is becoming an endangered species, this paper reports on the results of an informal survey of undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in a children's literature course. The survey results reported in the paper indicated that some students were able to complete a cloze-type Mother Goose couplet, but others audibly…

This study examined whether familiarity with content influences performance on conditional reasoning problems of the form P implies Q independently of ease of generation of specific examples of "Q and not-P." Results indicated that increased content familiarity resulted in higher performance levels. (Author/JAZ)

The effects of prior knowledge and information orderings on the immediate and delayed recall of unfamiliar information under various levels of control for the effects of cognitive style and reading achievement were studied. Significant interaction effects were discovered. (Author/DF)

Research on the evaluation of World Wide Web sites has already begun, but it is proceeding at a slow rate. The main reasons for this are the attempt to adapt existing methodologies to the particularities of the Web, the individual structure of Webs sites, and the issue of finding the appropriate evaluators. This study addresses these points and…

Prior experience learning often requires new and different kinds of measurement techniques. Methods are described that have been developed to identify and assess the prior experiential learning of adult women from their unpaid work in the home and the community. (Author/PN)

Uses 227 elementary education majors to investigate the effect of past musical training on students' present ability to perform on music achievement test items. Investigates if a difference existed between students with training and those without training, and if a difference existed in the type of training. (Author/AH)

Argues that Piaget's cognitive stage theory complements psycholinguistic theories of fluent reading by clarifying how readers acquire and then use prior knowledge. Suggests that, in this light, teachers may want to rearrange the order and manner in which they present units from basal readers. (FL)