Examines the effect of contrived instructional texts and naturally occurring texts (content area textbooks) on students' main idea comprehension. Concludes that students taught to identify the main idea using only contrived texts, such as basal skills lessons, will have difficulty transferring their main idea skills to naturally occurring texts.…

Discusses a study designed to understand 11th-grade students' learning during conversations with their teacher over and about a computer-based Newtonian microworld, Interactive Physics. Illustrates that students' learning was not local but persistent, in that they used appropriate canonical science talk without teacher support. (36 references)…

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…

This empirical investigation, implemented with a computer program, examined the influence of graphical and numerical representations on the discovery process involving iteration sequence properties and concomitant problem-solving abilities for 79 eleventh grade students and 22 secondary mathematics teachers. Results indicate that heuristics and…

Reports on a process/product study undertaken to increase understanding of the nature of language instruction and its effect on language proficiency. Also discussed are a number of pedagogical issues arising from the study. (30 references)

Among 150 eleventh grade American Indian students, those attending urban high schools were significantly more creative than reservation students on 5 of 7 variables of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, Figural Form B. There was no significant difference between groups in academic achievement. Contains approximately 100 references. (SV)

The relative influence of best friends and social crowds of 324 older adolescents (eleventh graders) on cigarette smoking was examined to determine influences as a function of sex, conformity, and friendship mutuality. Best friends, rather than social crowd, appeared to be the major influence in this group. (SLD)

Used computers to observe when foreign language (FL) readers look up meaning of unfamiliar words when reading FL text. Experiments with 82 English-speaking Dutch students from grades 10 and 11 show look-up behavior was clearly influenced by perceived word relevance, modestly influenced by reader's vocabulary knowledge, and not influenced by…

Ways in which student beliefs and goals distinguish different styles of engagement with learning, and how such styles are associated with student strategies were studied for 137 female eleventh graders in Australia. Six identified styles of engagement are discussed in terms of insights from analysis preserving the multidimensional character of…

Discusses two field studies that observed the behavior of 11th-grade students as they used reference sources to write research papers. Topics include plagiarism, citing sources correctly, paraphrasing, and the intervention role of the teacher of information skills and composition. Examples of copying are appended. (Author/LRW)

Describes a lesson plan designed for an eleventh-grade honors American Studies course, but also works well for regular-level classes. Engages students in reading, discussing, and writing their own fictional slave narratives. Enables the students to connect literary texts to historical contexts and to experience antebellum history in a personal…

Presents an interdisciplinary thematic unit designed for eleventh graders that uses selected chapters of "The Martian Chronicles" to teach frontier history. Maintains that Bradbury's novel enriches students' understanding of the frontier because it compares the interactions between Native inhabitants of Mars and Earthlings to the…

To encourage the students in her French class to read books in French, a teacher implemented a project involving literary journals. Students recorded their reflections on their reading, first of a novel chosen by the teacher, then of individually chosen novels. Appropriate evaluation of the journals posed a particular dilemma. (JLR)

Videotaped observations were made of seventh and eleventh grade students using an instructional hypermedia system. Three profiles of hypermedia navigation emerged with each style characterized by distinct information processing strategies. Analysis of the characteristics of learners revealed that students within each profile group had similar…

The Minnesota Zoo's School of Environmental Studies is an optional, interdisciplinary program open to juniors and seniors from four comprehensive high schools. The problems posed, like those in the world, require students to think across disciplines. Students measure, analyze, map, photograph, display, and present findings to the local community…