In language instruction, students do not learn to elicit needed information in the classroom or in real, everyday communicative situations because (1) the material they ask questions about in class is basically uninteresting to them, and (2) many student responses that would be incomprehensible to a non-English-speaking person are left uncorrected…

Nearly 48 percent of the students in Developmental Studies Mathematics courses at a major southern university during the fall of 1983 had taken college preparatory mathematics courses in high school. Some had even taken trigonometry, pre-calculus, or calculus. Yet, they were placed in university developmental studies mathematics courses because…

This report was designed to provide information on the effectiveness of the high school mathematics program in Hawaii, including identification of deficiency areas. The Stanford Achievement Test of Academic Skills (TASK) Level 1 was administered to 10,154 tenth-grade students in October 1983. In general, the students did not perform as well as the…

This report was designed to provide information on the effectiveness of the mathematics instructional program in grade 2 in Hawaii, including identification of deficiency areas. The Stanford Achievement Test, Primary Level II, was administered in May 1984 to 12,106 students in grade 2. In general, these students performed better than the national…

Three studies were conducted in order to determine the source and frequency of children's difficulties in subtraction and to examine different approaches to remediation. In the first study, third-grade children were asked to solve subtraction problems and were observed and questioned about their solution processes. Children who had difficulty…

This document contains 14 papers selected from those presented at the Seventh Annual Conference of the Research Council for Diagnostic and Prescriptive Mathematics. Categorized as interdisciplinary studies are reports on "Mathematics as an Activity of Our Intelligence" by Skemp and a study on "The Brain Basis of Developing…

Repetitions in children's oral reading are typically thought of as disruptive, signalling the kind of careless reading symptomatic of random eye movement or inattention to context. This perspective, however, runs contrary to clinical experiences, which have revealed that many repetitions are deliberate and benefit the reader by serving at least…

Outside the core grammar, the set of "peripheral" or marked properties of a language include exceptions or relaxations of the settings of core grammar and the idiosyncratic features of the language governed by particular lexical items. The core/peripheral distinction has direct implications for grammatical development in children. The…

This work studies the difficulties children have solving two-step word problems of a given structure (e.g., 7 lollypops/2 chocolate bars X 6 chocolate bars). Thirty-six children between the ages of 9 and 14 years were individually observed solving problems of the above type. Other tasks, repetition of the problem and model recognition, were used…

Cognitive perspective-taking has attracted considerable attention in the mainstream developmental literature, and is most commonly studied under the rubric of Theory of Mind. The current article reviews the levels of understanding of informational states that are believed to underlie cognitive perspective-taking from this conceptual framework. An…

Results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and other large scale tests are often reported as rank ordered lists showing mean values for each of the 50 states. Using data from the 2003 State NAEP Assessment, this paper examines the standard errors associated with State NAEP scores and explains why the use of rank order…

An examination of the effectiveness of EA, CA, and students' perception of difficulty in predicting and explaining language learning difficulties. (RM)

A detailed error analysis was performed on spontaneous and elicited speech samples of Anglo second graders learning Spanish. The results tended to disconfirm the L to the subpower of 1 = L to the subpower of 2 hypothesis that first and second language acquisition follow identical patterns. However, evidence suggests that genuine similarities do…

This report illustrates procedures of item construction for addition and subtraction examples involving decimal fractions. Using a procedural network of skills required to solve such examples, an item characteristic matrix of skills analysis was developed to describe the characteristics of the content domain by projected student difficulties. Then…

This paper, presented at the 1979 meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), investigates student errors in high school mathematics. A conceptual framework of hypothetical information-handling processes such as procedures, frames, retrieval from memory, visually-moderated sequences (VMS sequences), the integrated sequence,…