Simple name-retrieval models of spoken word planning (Bloem & La Heij, 2003; Starreveld & La Heij, 1996) maintain (1) that there are two levels in word planning, a conceptual and a lexical phonological level, and (2) that planning a word in both object naming and oral reading involves the selection of a lexical phonological representation.…

Previous research on educational aspirations has focused almost exclusively on micro-level predictors of educational aspirations. Notably absent from these studies are measures reflecting the neighborhood context in which adolescents live. Drawing on Wilson's theory of neighborhood effects, the present study examines the extent to which…

In a recent poll that asked American adults to identify "the single most significant event that has happened in their lifetime, in terms of its importance to the U.S. and the world," 46 percent of the respondents cited the attacks of September 11, 2001, as the most significant occurrence in their lifetime. In light of this result, it is not…

On the first day of English composition, students unleash a torrent of reasons why writing scared them as they write their opening day personal autobiographies. Most comments focus on reasons that have little to do with the craft or complexities of great writing. Numerous students bemoan their use of "substandard" English, thinking that their ways…

Canadian scholar Elizabeth Brule argues in her 2004 essay, "Going to the Market," that the corporatization of the university has led to the construction of students as rational, economic decision makers. As Brule argues, "The only choices considered rational, however, are those that increase one's employment opportunities within the strict…

The purpose of this study was to measure whether Christian programs had a positive influence on the academic achievement of low-literate male inmates. The sample consisted of 124 male inmates in a closed security prison in the southeastern United States who were participating in an Adult Basic Education (ABE) program. The researcher grouped the…

In this study, social constructionism provided a theoretical framework for investigating how students' struggles with reading are socially constructed in school literacy contexts, curriculum, and relationships. The study also sought to discover how "struggling reader" is a socially constructed subjectivity or identity that begins in the early…

This paper focuses on the experiences of British parents who have children identified with "special education needs" within mainstream education. Expectations of mainstream education can have a negative affect on parents when a child is unable to maintain his or her education within a mainstream school. In England and Wales,…

In an instructional message the contextual dominance is most often conveyed in the form of printed or spoken sentences. Within any sentence used in conjunction with a picture are nouns or phrases that directly relate to contextual elements within the picture. These are called referents since they refer to objects perceptible in the picture. This…

Stereotypically, anger is associated more with males than females, yet self-report and observational measures have not unequivocally revealed gender-related differences in anger expression. To explore this contradiction, male (n=21)and female (n=23) college students were asked to describe anger incidents they had witnessed that involved either a…

This study investigated whether language context affects language choice in a Spanish-English bilingual infant from age 1;3 to 1;10. Most studies of child bilingualism assume that communicative competence occurs at a stage in language development after the onset of syntactic constructions, but this paper hypothesizes that once the child begins to…

This paper summarizes an investigation of the format used for equating the 1993 Illinois Goal Assessment Program (IGAP) sixth grade reading test. In 1992, each student took only one test, either a narrative test or an expository test. In 1993, there was only one test, which included both formats. Several possible approaches for linking the 1993…

This paper presents a critical analysis of the forms of constructivism that owe their origin either directly or indirectly to Piaget's theory. The paper is organized into three sections. The first provides a brief synopsis of the structuralist assumptions underlying Piagetian theory and then demonstrates the ways in which these assumptions…

Two kinds of perspectives governing the provision and preservation of knowledge, a universal and an ecological perspective, are discussed in this paper. In the first case, scientific observations are represented through a semantic interpretation of facts. This is illustrated with a series of experiments on semantic feature perception in the recall…

Item parameter estimates vary for a variety of reasons, including estimation error, characteristics of the examinee samples, and context effects (e.g., item location effects, section location effects, etc.). Although we expect variation based on theory, there is reason to believe that observed variation in item parameter estimates exceeds what…