Poor readers and reading age level controls performed a primed picture naming task and a lexical decision task. Additionally, vocabulary performance was assessed for both groups. Subjects were 42 Dutch children--mean age for the poor readers was 145 months and for controls was 117 months. In the picture naming task there were three priming…

This study explored how college students, enrolled in an educational psychology course, perceived effort, ability, and success/failure outcomes. Students completed a set of open-ended questions that explored their thoughts about effort, ability, and success/failure. The initial classroom examination, taken during the third week of the semester,…

A major goal of state education reforms in the 1980s was to increase the number of courses students were required to complete for graduation. This document provides quantitative transcript data from high schools enrolling mostly lower achieving students in the 1980s. At 3 points in time, random samples of approximately 25 transcripts of graduating…

To raise the spelling test scores of the lowest-level readers and poorest spellers in a third grade class, a practicum developed and implemented a spelling improvement program. Various strategies were implemented to allow for different learning modalities. Multi-sensory activities, computer managed instruction, and computer assisted instruction…

Children from open and traditional classrooms were matched for IQ, sex, age, grade and then administered reading and creativity tests. Results showed the high IQ, traditional students had high reading and creativity scores. (DEP)

This resource document is one of a series of nine resource documents, each of which addresses a separate factor in the "Assessment of School Needs for Low-Achieving Students" survey that can help determine a student's academic success and each of which contains information that responds to specific survey items. This document addresses the factor…

A survey was developed asking educators to describe their most effective strategies for teaching marginal learners--students who do not succeed academically in the regular classroom. A total of 97 surveys were returned, and the recommended strategies were compiled. The paper begins by describing marginal learners. This is followed by seven…

This summary presents the major findings of recent research carried out at the Center for Research on Elementary and Middle Schools at Johns Hopkins University and published in "Ability Grouping and Student Achievement in Elementary Schools: A Best-Evidence Synthesis." The center examined more than 100 studies of five ability-grouping…

The paper reviews findings and implications of curriculum based assessment (CBA), an approach focusing on collecting, interpreting, and using data to help lower achieving students have opportunities for success in mainstreamed settings. An instructional delivery model is presented to guage the probability of task success and provide a structure…

The primary goal of special educators must always be to optimize the instruction given to low-performing students. The amount of teacher-directed instruction that low-performing students receive is directly related to their achievement. To maximize the amount of teacher-directed instruction, small and large group instruction is recommended.…

A study is in progress (with posttesting planned for April 1989), which examines whether word processing enhances the particular benefits of sentence-combining practice on the reading comprehension and writing fluency of low-achieving intermediate students. Subjects are 80 low-achieving fourth grade students from a Florida school district,…

This study attempted to determine whether better predictions of school-level achievement scores than have been reported for big city school districts could be attained by determining whether concentrations of poverty and related social characteristics are related to achievement in such a way as to make it possible to identify specific threshold…

Factors which determine secondary school students' participation in homework assignments were examined. Students of diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds in three high schools in Perth, Western Australia, responded to questionnaires and interviews and kept homework diaries. Teachers, administrators, and parents also responded to the…

A study was initiated to determine effective teaching strategies for the art education of low achieving students. A review of literature on academic drive yielded five mechanistic models that provided explanations for low-achievement drive. The key factors in these models were avoidance, time gradients, extraneous stimuli, prolonged deprivations,…

A study was undertaken to identify the strategies good and poor readers at the university level use when reading a text assignment. Forty-four study strategies were identified based on answers to a questionnaire concerning how they studied that was given to one hundred university freshmen enrolled in an elective reading and study skills class.…