This book provides guidelines for teachers and parents in helping high-risk students to succeed academically by developing the skills and behaviors necessary for successful learning. It focuses on creating practical applications of the new discoveries being made in the neurosciences and demonstrates techniques for teaching to the whole brain.…

Gifted underachievers (n=108) were compared to gifted high achievers (n=96). All children had Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - Revised (WISC-R) IQ scores of 130 or greater, but underachievers were performing at or below the 50th percentile in at least one major area of achievement, whereas high achievers were at the 96th percentile or…

This proceedings contains summaries of 24 conference papers focusing on new directions in gifted education. Each paper's summary is about four pages in length. Papers have the following titles and authors: "Supporting Giftedness in Girls in the Classroom" (Julia Ellis); "A Community of Learners in ECS" (Anne Green);…

This presentation summarizes effective strategies and programs for nurturing students who are gifted in science. A smorgasbord of educationally accelerative opportunities is recommended, to enhance students' potential for future development in science. These opportunities may include field trips, advanced placement courses, and science summer…

This booklet, which concerns student writing on a social studies examination given to Alberta (Canada) students, addresses two major purposes. First, the booklet illustrates and compares two important levels of expectations, or standards, that have been set for student writing on this examination: satisfactory and excellent. Second, it provides…

Whether gender differences in performance using computer software are due to sex stereotyping or gender differentiation in the programs was investigated in two studies. An adventure game, "King and Crown," with all male characters, and a gender neutral game, "Honeybears," were played by 26 female and 26 male 11- and…

A collection of essays on the comprehension of text brings together perspectives of different disciplines on discourse. Articles include: "Naturalistic Texts and Naturalistic Tasks" (Herre van Oostendorp, Rolf A. Zwaan); "Psychological Studies of Naturalistic Text" (Arthur C. Graesser, Joseph P. Magliano, Karl Haberlandt);…

A retrospective ethnographic study examined the sociocultural environments of fifth-grade Navajo children who have become successful readers. During the second month of school, six fifth-grade teachers at Fort Defiance Elementary School on the Navajo Reservation identified 66 of their 150 students as successful readers, a judgment that was…

This conference proceedings document on gifted education presents texts of the following papers, among others: "Developing Visual Literacy--Start It Young" (Kay Anderson); "Building Provincial Exams To Challenge the Gifted" (Dennis Belyk); "Advocacy and Lobbying: An Exercise in Persuasion" (Patricia Boyle); "Program Continuity and Curriculum…

This study explored the hearing capabilities of Down Syndrome (DS) adolescents and young adults relative to a matched sample of non-DS trainable mentally handicapped (MH) individuals, and examined the relationship between hearing ability and performance on several cognitive tasks. Samples of 26 DS and 26 MH individuals were matched on intelligence…

The fourth phase of a longitudinal study focusing on the cognitive and language development of children in a primary-grade Spanish immersion program (SIP) is reported. Subjects were the remaining 13 members of an SIP cohort beginning in 1987, 15 members of a standard program comparison classroom, 18 members of another class in the 1987 SIP cohort,…

A study investigated whether reading ability is a significant factor in the level of student writing apprehension and whether writing apprehension is reduced as reading skills improve. Subjects were 49 college freshmen enrolled in a reading improvement course that was directed toward learning in three domains: (1) cognitive--knowledge, synthesis,…

Questions about how parents' childrearing time becomes associated with different developmental outcomes and about the relative importance of the quantity and quality of shared parent/child time remain largely unanswered. A study explored such associations in a sample of 48 white middle class third and fourth graders (24 boys and 24 girls) and…

In an effort to create a multilevel, interactive, and hypothesis-based model of the reading comprehension process that bridges interdisciplinary gaps in the theory of learning, this report focuses on descriptions of cognitive processes developed in the fields of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, sociolinguistics, linguistics, and…

Recent literature on individual differences in verbal ability indicates that people demonstrating high verbal comprehension are quicker and more accurate in identifying lexical items, as well as more rapid in parsing sentences. They are not, however, more sensitive to the general gist of a passage, and thus do not respond to priming from context…