In this article, the author compares the ways in which parent-child communication--a major indicator of parental involvement--influences children's educational achievement across 14 countries. Using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the author examines the extent to which social class differences in the effect of…

A conceptual framework is proposed which will advance instructional development (ID) theory, especially at the macro level which encompasses planning, development, and implementation. The influence of critical and situational factors and the interaction between the practitioner and the surrounding context is explored and illuminated. Situational…

Results of a study into secondary school students' and teachers' conceptions of what mathematics is and the purposes of school mathematics are outlined. A total of about 220 first year engineering students and 600 high school students in Australia were involved in the surveys while 40 students, 19 teachers, 2 career counselors, and 2…

In two studies, children participated in route-planning tasks in which they were asked to find the shortest path to retrieve certain items. In Study 1, children participated in two versions of the task (standard versus feedback) differing in the amount of contextual support. Forty-eight children, ages 6, 8, and 10 years, had to help their…

Evaluation of principals' performance has not kept pace with changes in schooling or with developments in teacher evaluation. Although some argue that schools' complexity makes outcomes-based evaluation of principals unrealistic, the need increases for tying evaluation to accountability. This paper describes one possible model based on principals'…

A framework for thinking about teacher empowerment is presented. Two important dimensions are used as a basis for highlighting some important similarities and differences emerging in the literature on empowerment. The first dimension relates to the context in which the process occurs. Some educators highlight the importance of the personal context…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate how event representation might operate in preschool children's understanding of the temporal terms "before" and "after." The first study, involving 3- and 4-year-olds (a total of 16 of each age) varied the arbitrariness of event sequences. Sixteen stories, each containing five…

The nature and development of semantic processing in chess was investigated in a study involving younger players from 6 through 18 years of age. Efforts were directed toward establishing the assertion that skilled players' memory for chess positions depends largely upon the availability of pre-stored schema (PSS) that are both abstract and…

The effects of three play contexts on young children's turn taking, topic maintenance, and topic change skills were investigated. Participants were 40 normally-developing, English-speaking Caucasian children of middle-income parents; they ranged in age from approximately 4 years to 6 and one half years. Subjects were subdivided into younger and…

This study was intended to determine whether sex-linked mathematics achievement and contextual differences persist into the university years. A random sample of 150 first-year mathematics students enrolled at a midwestern university was identified. A common 30-item calculus readiness test and a 37-item questionnaire, dealing with students'…

Recent findings have shown that bizarre imagery can be an effective mnemonic aid when lengthy retention intervals are employed, and when the surrounding context contains more normal elements. Testing the hypothesis that an interaction exists between context and time of testing with bizarre images, a study paired 40 male and female undergraduates,…

Decontextualization, referring to the abstraction of a written text from all of its contexts, is a flawed concept. Rather than viewing writing as an isolated abstraction, a text's involvement with the human world should be acknowledged. Two major questions arise when dealing with the concept of decontextualization: (1) Can written discourse be…

Sociocultural theorists recognise that cognition is not an individual construction, but is distributed across people as they participate in culturally relevant activities. Thus, rather than being a universal skill, thinking is very much contextually specific, guided by others, and mediated by particular cultural tools and artefacts. Yet there is a…

Presents three strategies for teaching the personal, operational, and cultural dimensions of literary response. (MM)

A total of 97 children three to seven years of age were identified as high-, medium-, or low-exploratory and participated in both independent sessions and 1 of 2 types of supportive sessions with an adult. Support consisted of either close attention by the adult to the child's exploration or modeling and direction by the adult. (Author/RH)