The following five reasons for failure to use learning strategies are discussed: poor cognitive monitoring, primitive routines that yield a product, a meager knowledge base, attributions and classroom goals that do not support strategy use, and minimal transfer. A theory of settings must be considered to address these issues. (TJH)

Examines differences in secondary students' vocabulary learning from original and revised contextual information. Finds that the revised passages generated significantly higher scores for both ability groups on the definition and importance measures but not on the indication of knowledge measure. (MG)

Confirmatory factor analysis of data from a representative household sample of 1,243 black adolescents and white adolescents shows that the hypothesized model of drinking motives of Cox and Klinger (1988) provides an excellent fit to the data, with a four-factor pattern that is invariant across gender, race, and age. (SLD)

The nine chapters of this theme issue show how, in diverse cultural settings, cooperative learning methods enhance learning and reduce frictions among learners. A second goal of these papers is to indicate how cooperative learning fits or doesn't fit in several societies. (SLD)

Today's students lack sufficient opportunities to practice caring or be rewarded for caring behavior. A caring culture in schools requires not radical restructuring of policies, curricula, and systems but subtle changes in attitudes and scope. Educators must consider students within their social and developmental contexts, redefine the teacher's…

Analysis of student constructed questions about common and decimal fractions of (n=27) students in grades five and six revealed that students seemed to construct experience- and interest-based questions rather than textbook-type word problems which tended to be multistep problems. (12 references) (MKR)

Analyzed the relationship between general coding orientation and specific characteristics associated with the family (social class, race, gender) and the school (pedagogic practice and science achievement) of (n=80) socially differentiated elementary school children. Found that there is a mutual influence of family and school factors on students'…

Examines the relationship between contextual variables and situational expectation of drug use at the school level. Results indicate that the more prosperous the school and the greater the students' perceptions of academic expectations, the lower the situational expectation of smoking cigarettes or taking depressants. However, the higher the…

Suggests that parenting beliefs are influenced by the broader societal contextual variations, and focuses on cultural and subcultural variation. Uses studies of parental beliefs among immigrant families who must make transitions across different cultural contexts to illustrate these variations. (ET)

Used a new statistical procedure to examine consensual beliefs about situations common to universities. This approach aims at constructing a joint hierarchical or non-hierarchical classification of situational categories. Results indicate that a psychologically meaningful and methodologically satisfactory representation of the cognitive…

Formulates 3 hypotheses based on contingency, congruency, and contextual relationships, and tests them empirically on a dataset of 71 randomly selected Dutch secondary schools. Results show that managerial competence is most obvious during hard times, and that principals need more crisis-management training. (52 references) (MLH)

Only the socioeconomic composition of the student body and the percentage of black students were significantly related to between-school differences in student academic norms in a study of student body variables, school organization, and teacher attitudes in 76 Louisiana schools involving 5,400 3rd graders. (SLD)

Responds to Romberg's reaction and argues that the present conservative social context will determine the use to which the "Standards" are put. Expresses concern that unequal school finance policies in providing technologically rich classroom environments will result in educational stratification. (MDH)

Curricular concerns and issues are suggested that encourage prospective teachers to think about the social, political, and institutional context of schooling. Specific issues are considered related to the substantive concerns of (1) teachers' work; (2) achievement of minority students; and (3) gender dynamics and teaching. (SLD)

Four experiments with 132 seventh graders, 162 eighth graders, 75 fourth graders, and 52 third graders compared the mnemonic keyword method with various other vocabulary learning strategies. Mnemonic keyword students outperformed sentence-context and free-study counterparts and generally outperformed others on tests of vocabulary usage. (SLD)