Adaptive inferential feedback (AIF) partner training is a cognitive technique that teaches the friends and family members of depressed patients to respond to the patients' dysfunctional thoughts in a targeted manner. These dysfunctional attributions, which AIF addresses, are a common residual feature of depression amongst remitted patients, and…

This study aims at understanding how the use of different reading activities affects readers' comprehension of short stories. Forty-seven students with an advanced level of English proficiency participated in the study where a quasi-experimental research design was pursued. The experimental and control groups of students completed different sets…

This article outlines certain problems and challenges facing the qualitative researcher who enters fields that are either extremely difficult to access or potentially hostile towards outsiders. Problems and dilemmas in such contexts are highlighted by reference to fieldwork research among PKK (Kurdistan Worker's Party) guerrillas in North…

The kinds of inferences that can be drawn from international educational assessment are explored, considering the evidence that can be obtained and how it can be interpreted. International assessments have been thought of as yielding information that allows comparisons of relative achievement by country and subject, or that allows the improvement…

A study examined children's memory of stories under three varying conditions and focused on how different interaction styles and children's innate abilities affect literacy development. The three conditions tested closely mirrored the three story-reading styles evidenced by teachers of young children were: (1) a control condition where there was…

This digest illustrates the variety of basic and theoretical issues in evaluation with which aspiring evaluators should be conversant in order to claim that they know the knowledge base of their profession. Coverage of the issues includes: the four steps in the logic of evaluation; whether qualitative evaluations are valid; whether it matters if…

Examples are given of how schema and classification skills, presented bilingually, can be used by classroom teachers to teach Spanish-speaking high school students how to infer the main idea of paragraphs in English. The instructional model is one in which the student learns to identify the main idea of a selection in a series of exercises that…

Two task were developed to assess second and fourth grade girls' ability to generate quantitative inferences and estimate answers to math word problems. The generation of quantitative inferences is thought to constitute problem representation, and the ability to estimate answers to word problems is facilitated by the presence of an accurate…

Diagnostic score reports linking assessment outcomes to instructional interventions are one of the most requested features of assessment products. There is a body of interesting work done in the last 20 years including Tatsuoka's rule space method (Tatsuoka, 1983), Haertal and Wiley's binary skills model (Haertal, 1984; Haertal & Wiley, 1993),…

A student researcher at a nonprofit, university-based family center for learning-disabled and underachieving students designed and implemented a 7-week practicum intervention meant to improve the ability of four first and second grade level students to use reasoning skills. Piagetian theory regarding expected levels of cognitive development was…

A study examined how both children and adults process inferences when reading prose. Subjects, 24 third-, fifth-, and eighth-graders, and adults, read stories where a consequence was implied, and then answered questions. The stories differed in the degree to which the inference was necessary for comprehension, and the readers engaged in either…

Implications of difficulties in using intuitive statistical reasoning are considered as they bear on the theoretic model viewing persons as intuitive scientists who make causal attributions in everyday life. Data sampling strategies and use of judgment rules to identify covariant events were investigated in two studies. Using a rule-analytic…

Based on the idea that inference abilities are essential to comprehension, this essay discusses systematic oral questioning strategies designed to help both junior and senior high school teachers develop students' reading comprehension abilities. Questioning strategies are examined in terms of their purpose, efficiency, motivation, and required…

A study investigated how two text-based factors, word relationships and surface syntactic structure, interact with readers' ability to analyze the semantic relationships and make inferences based on those analyses. In each passage, the influence of word relationships was assessed by manipulating the degree of semantic entailment between two words…

A study investigated the degree to which first language ability was associated with successful English-as-a-second-language acquisition in 33 outstanding Indonesian teachers. It examined the applicability of theories of common underlying proficiency in the storage of two languages and the development of cognitive academic language proficiency. The…