A study examined the hypothesis that learning strategy coupled with efficacy-building teaching interactions would lead to greater strategic learning than learning strategy instruction alone. A reading comprehension strategy was taught to 184 students from 4 Los Angeles County (California) public and independent schools. Included were 65…

A pilot study was conducted to examine the information with respect to the modes, referents, and relationships that a given teacher acquires through the examination of her students' written responses to open-ended tasks and how the teacher uses this information. The participating teacher taught sixth grade in a public elementary school in a…

Children frequently must adapt to changes in their environments, such as school transitions. The different types of social support from different sources were examined here so as to determine the processes by which such support mediates the stress of school transitions. Students' perceptions of the types or amount of support they received from…

A study was conducted to determine if students from low socioeconomic environments have lower academic achievement compared to the academic achievement of students from higher socioeconomic environments. The sample consisted of 66 6th-grade science students at Travis Middle School, Temple, Texas. The students were divided into a low-income group…

This booklet contains the practice tests for the Sixth-grade Ohio Proficiency Tests. Student work on these practice tests helps the teacher evaluate how well the student understands the subjects of writing, reading, mathematics, citizenship, and science. The writing test consists of two writing tasks based on one stimulus passage, and the reading,…

This study used an open-ended problem-solving approach to teaching and assessing middle school students' understanding of the concept of arithmetic average. Three main results of this study show evidence of positive instructional impact on students' understanding of the concept of average: (1) the number of students who gave correct answers…

This unit is one of a series that presents specific moments in history from which students focus on the meanings of landmark events. The lessons included in this unit attempt to make slavery comprehensible to students, showing its oppressiveness and yet explaining how white Southern culture rationalized and sustained it. The unit also explains how…

This unit is one of a series that represents specific moments in history from which students focus on the meanings of landmark events. By relying on primary sources, this unit explores the Puritans' attempt to create a utopian community in New England, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The unit is built around 7 objectives: (1) to study historical…

A study investigated the effects of strategy instruction on the reading and writing abilities of sixth-grade middle-school students with delayed literacy. An experimental group of 10 sixth-grade, English-speaking inner-city students in the midwestern United States was matched on race, gender, and reading comprehension test scores with 10…

This report presents grade six findings of the Longitudinal Study of Children at Risk, an on-going, prospective study that has followed 1,235 low-income, minority children in the Chicago Public Schools since 1986. Three major questions are addressed in the report: What are the children's levels of school competence and socioemotional development?;…

This study was undertaken to explore whether incest, extrafamilial sexual abuse, and physical abuse are linked with different psychological or behavioral consequences, and whether abuse affects males and females differently. In 1989, a survey instrument was administered to all 6th, 9th, and 12th graders in 84% of all the public schools in…

The Minnesota Student Survey, including questions on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) virus transmission and sexual activity, was completed by approximately 88,000 6th-, 9th-, and 12th-graders during the 1988-89 school year. Sexual activity questions were not asked of sixth graders. Over 90% of high school students knew about sharing…

This paper reports a study to address two questions concerning children's understanding of average: How do children construct and interpret representativeness within the context of data sets? and How do children think about the mean as a particular mathematical definition and relationship? Twenty-one students (seven each of 4th, 6th, and 8th…

This study compared the use of traditional methods and the use of reconstructive elaborations on learning specialized science vocabulary, involving two sixth-grade students with emotional disturbances. The reconstructive elaborations were pictures that linked together information to make it more familiar and meaningful, most commonly through the…

The intent of this study was to reduce the numbers of off-task behaviors of a group of 32 sixth-grade students in an economically disadvantaged, urban, junior high school. The subjects of the study were given the materials (paper, the mathematics book, and pencils) and seated before the tardy bell. Following teacher graphing of each of the…