Students' aptitudes and their reports of cognitive processes during direct instruction.

72 5th- and 6th-grade students were randomly assigned to 1 of 6 classes using a factorial assignment of ability level crossed with attitude. Each class was taught a 2-day unit on probability, using the direct instruction model. Ss were videotaped during the lesson and afterward were interviewed about their thought processes using a stimulated-recall procedure. Independent of ability, Ss' reports of their understanding of the lesson were significantly related to achievement. Also, Ss who reported using specific cognitive strategies, such as relating the information being taught to prior knowledge, did better on the achievement test than those who did not report such strategies. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Accuracy of teacher judgments of student responses to standardized test items.

Six students were randomly selected from each of 4 3rd-grade and 4 5th-grade classes. For each of their 6 students, teachers were asked to predict whether the student had responded correctly or incorrectly to selected items on the SRA (Science Research Associates) Achievement Series. Aggregate measures of teachers' judgments of their students' responses correlated positively and substantially with aggregate measures of students' actual responses. Teachers accurately judged their students' responses to individual items for approximately three-quarters of the total number of test items. However, the accuracy of teachers' judgments varied significantly with subtest, and there were significant individual differences among teachers in the accuracy of their judgments. Teachers were least accurate in judging low-performing students and most accurate in judging high-performing students. These results are consistent with previous research and are discussed within the context of interactive decision making of teachers. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Extended mnemonic instruction with learning disabled students.

Divided 64 learning disabled (LD) 6th-, 7th-, and 8th-grade students into 24 instructional groups that were assigned at random to mnemonic and control conditions. Instructional groups were administered 3 daily lessons on dinosaurs in counterbalanced order. The lessons involved vocabulary on dinosaurs, attributes of dinosaurs, and reasons for dinosaur extinction. Mnemonic groups were taught the information using keyword and pegword techniques. Control instructional groups were taught the same information using the principles of direct instruction, including teacher-directed questioning, choral group responding, fast instructional pacing, and cumulative review. A test was given after each lesson on that lesson's content. On the 4th day, all Ss were given production and identification tests on the content of all 3 lessons. Results indicate that mnemonic groups outperformed control groups on the immediate and delayed tests. In addition, control Ss' responses revealed significantly more intralist intrusions than did those of mnemonic Ss. No meaningful trend across days of instruction was observed for either condition. Findings suggest that mnemonic instruction is a versatile and effective instructional technique for LD students. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Extended text and the writing proficiency of students in urban elementary schools.

The effect of extended text writing on the writing proficiency of elementary students in urban schools was investigated. 39 4th- and 5th-grade classrooms were observed and categorized according to the ratio of extended text to exercises written by students and according to the level of student engagement. Analyses revealed that students in classrooms characterized by extended text outperformed students in classrooms characterized by exercises both in the quality of the content of their writing and in correct use of writing conventions, after adjustment for pretest differences at both the student and classroom levels. The effect of extended text instruction was consistent for both students of ethnic minority (African American, Mexican American, and Native American) status and students of White European ancestry. No differences were found on a multiple-choice test of language skills. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Agressivité et statut auprès des pairs chez les gar?ons du primaire: un examen de la règle de dissimilarité.

Studied the influence of the value attached to aggression by a peer group on the relationship between aggression and peer status. Human Ss: 171 normal male Canadian school-age children (mean age 8 yrs) (3rd-grade students from 14 classes). 106 normal male Canadian school-age children (mean age 10 yrs) (5th-grade students from 9 classes). Ss completed interviews, questionnaires, and peer nomination inventories to assess their peer status and attitudes toward aggression (ATA). Teachers filled out a behavior problem checklist for each S. Interactions between aggressive behavior and peer status were analyzed, and for each grade level, results from the 3 classes with the highest group ATA scores were compared to results from the 3 classes with the lowest group ATA scores. (English abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Enhancing third-grade student' mathematical problem solving with self-regulated learning strategies.

The authors assessed the contribution of self-regulated learning strategies (SRL), when combined with problem-solving transfer instruction (L. S. Fuchs et al., 2003), on 3rd-graders' mathematical problem solving. SRL incorporated goal setting and self-evaluation. Problem-solving transfer instruction taught problem-solution methods, the meaning of transfer, and 4 superficial-problem features that change a problem without altering its type or solution; it also prompted metacognitive awareness to transfer. The authors contrasted the effectiveness of transfer plus SRL to the transfer treatment alone and to teacher-designed instruction. Twenty-four 3rd-grade teachers, with 395 students, were assigned randomly to conditions. Treatments were conducted for 16 weeks. Students were pre- and posttested on problem-solving tests and responded to a posttreatment questionnaire tapping self-regulation processes. SRL positively affected performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Triarchic theories of intelligence: Aristotle and Sternberg.

Aristotle's triarchic theory of intelligence prefigures, but apparently does not serve directly as a source for, Sternberg's comparable contemporary theory. The independently derived similarities in their gross structure lend weight to some triarchic view. Sternberg's analytical, practical, and creative intelligences closely resemble Aristotle's theoretical, practical, and productive excellences of intelligence. Each comparable component incorporates significantly related ideas. Disparities may be attributed to a variety of differences in the aims, methods, and resources of Aristotle's and Sternberg's inquiries. This is not the first time in the history of psychology that roughly parallel investigations have yielded comparable theories, but it is surely among the most temporally disjoined. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

La réputation sociale de l'enfant en milieu scolaire.

Studied the social reputations of elementary school children. Ss were 76 2nd-grade (mean age 7.5 yrs), 71 3rd-grade (mean age 8.5 yrs), and 83 4th-grade students (mean age 9.7 yrs). Using the peer nomination technique, Ss were assessed collectively on 8 dimensions requiring both social and academic judgments. A cluster analysis was performed to identify groups with different sociometric profiles. Correlations between peer evaluations and teacher evaluations of Ss' social reputations were determined. (English abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Long-term memory for knowledge learned in school.

Three experiments examined students' long-term retention of knowledge learned in college courses. In Exp 1 retention was measured 4 and 11 mo after the term ended. Students retained a great deal of what they originally learned, and there were no differential forgetting effects as a function of level of original learning. Exp 2 compared retention for recall test items and 3 types of multiple-choice test items: recognition, comprehension, and mental skills. Students performed poorer on recall items, but there were no differences among the multiple-choice items measuring the other types of tasks. Exp 3 analyzed retention for student tutors. Tutors retained more after 4 mo than the students they tutored. This suggests that tutoring, a type of overlearning, has positive effects that are maintained over time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of Historical Reasoning Instruction and Writing Strategy Mastery in Culturally and Academically Diverse Middle School Classrooms.

Seventy 8th-grade students (including talented writers, those with average ability, and students in need of special education services) participated in an integrated social studies and language arts unit designed to promote historical understandings and argumentative writing skills. The historical reasoning instruction lasted 12 days, and the writing instruction lasted 10 days. Students applied historical inquiry strategies when reading documents related to westward expansion and learned to plan argumentative essays related to each historical event. Results indicate that in comparison to 62 students in a control group who did not receive either form of instruction, students who demonstrated mastery of the target strategies during instruction wrote historically more accurate and more persuasive essays regardless of their initial learning profile. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aptitude?×?treatment interaction effects on teacher structuring and student participation in college instruction.

Investigated the generalizability to college instruction of Aptitude by Treatment interactions (ATIs) found in the author's (1977) study of 9th-grade students. The experimenter taught a 5-wk educational psychology course to 4 classes of undergraduates according to 4 treatments that varied in the amount of teacher structuring and student participation. Lessons were videotaped and coded to demonstrate fidelity of treatment implementation. Ss completed aptitude measures at the beginning of the study and achievement and attitude measures at the end of the study; these included the Extended Range Vocabulary Test, Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, and 2 achievement scales from the California Psychological Inventory. Generalized regression analysis indicated significant ATIs for achievement via independence and for Ability by Anxiety. Some similarities and some differences found when ATIs for college students and 9th-grade students were compared are noted. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The relationship of family structure to adolescent drug use, peer affiliation, and perception of peer acceptance of drug use

This study examined the relationship of family structure to adolescent gateway drug use and peer-related factors. The sample consisted of 2,121 randomly selected students in grades 8, 10, and 12 from seventeen school districts in northeastern Ohio. Students were administered a self-report instrument containing items measuring drug use and psychosocial variables. For purposes of analysis, the dependent variables included frequency of use of five gateway drugs, degree of affiliation with drug-using peers, and perceptions of peer acceptance of drug use. Comparison groups included single-parent (both mother- and father-headed), stepparent, and intact families. Analyses were conducted separately by grade level. Significant differences were found between groups on the drug-use variables at grades 8 and 10, with adolescents from intact families reporting less frequent drug use, fewer drug-using friends, and perceptions of more peer disapproval of drug use. Interestingly, there were several statistically significant group differences on perceptions of peer acceptance of drug use and the number of drug-using friends at the 8th-grade level. The largest differences were found between the single-parent (father-headed) and intact groups, with adolescents from father-headed families showing more frequent beer and liquor consumption at the 10th-grade level.     

The effectiveness of a question-exploration routine for enhancing the content learning of secondary students.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a question-exploration routine and an associated graphic organizer on students' ability to think about and answer complex questions. Participants were 116 students of diverse abilities in seven 7th grade classes. The effects of the routine were compared with the effects of a traditional lecture-discussion format using a counterbalanced design. The measure, composed of matching, multiple-choice, and short-answer questions, assessed students' knowledge and comprehension of facts, main ideas, and relationships that require higher order thinking. Overall, significant differences representing large to very large effect sizes were found between the total test scores of students in the 2 groups. Specifically, students taught using the question-exploration routine earned higher total test scores than did students taught using the lecture-discussion method. Similar differences were found for matching, multiple-choice, and short-answer items. The scores earned by subgroups of students (high achievers, average achievers, low achievers, and students with disabilities) followed the same general pattern. Students in all subgroups had more difficulty conveying main ideas in writing than in multiple-choice formats. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of long-term vocabulary instruction on lexical access and reading comprehension.

To examine the relationship between knowledge of word meanings and semantic processes, 27 4th-grade children were taught 104 words over a 5-mo period. Following instruction, Ss performed tasks designed to require semantic processes ranging from single word semantic decisions to simple sentence verification and memory for connected text. On all these tasks, instructed Ss performed at a significantly higher level than controls matched on pre-instruction vocabulary knowledge and comprehension. Thus, instructed Ss gave evidence both of learning word meanings taught by the program and of being able to process instructed words more efficiently in tasks more reflective of comprehension. Implications for vocabulary instruction and the role of individual word meanings in comprehension are discussed. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adults' expectancies about children's emotional responsiveness: Implications for the development of implicit theories of affect.

96 undergraduates and preschool, 3rd-grade, and 6th-grade children were presented with vignettes depicting 8 types of experiences and were asked what would be their own (for children) or a preschool, 3rd-grade, or 6th-grade child's (for adults) emotional reaction. Without exception, adults' expectancies agreed with those of 3rd and 6th graders. However, adults' expectancies about preschoolers' affect varied significantly from preschoolers' own accounts for vignettes presenting experiences of success, dishonesty that is discovered, dishonesty that is not discovered, being the target of aggression, and unjustified punishment. Adults and preschoolers did agree in predicted affective responses to failure, nurturance, and justified punishment. Overall, adults did not differentiate their predictions as a function of the age of the child whose affective reactions they were asked to predict, indicating an absence of developmental considerations in their implicit theories of children's emotional responsiveness. Results are discussed within a framework of social cognition, focusing on the nature and development of implicit theories about affect. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of self-handicapping tendencies

This study was undertaken to determine when U.S. children begin to self-handicap, that is, to reduce preparation effort before evaluations rather than applying themselves to do their best. The personal variables examined for their impact on practice behavior were gender, grade level, and self-esteem. The situational variables were time of the self-esteem test (before or after the evaluation task) and importance of the evaluation task. The results showed that (a) the 6th-grade boys were more likely than the 6th-grade girls to self-handicap, (b) the 3rd-grade children were not as affected as the 6th-grade children by the self-evaluation implications of performance evaluations, (c) self-handicapping by low-self-esteem and high-self-esteem 6th graders depended on recent experiences, and (d) the self-affirming experience of a self-esteem test reduced the motivation to self-handicap among high-self-esteem 6th-grade boys.     

Explicitly teaching for transfer: Effects on third-grade students' mathematical problem solving.

The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of explicitly teaching for transfer by (a) broadening the categories by which students group problems requiring the same solution methods and (b) prompting students to search novel problems for these broad categories. This transfer treatment was combined with instruction on solution methods. The effectiveness of a combined treatment (transfer-plus-solution instruction) was contrasted to solution instruction alone and to teacher-designed instruction. Twenty-four 3rd-grade teachers, with 375 students, were assigned randomly to conditions. Treatments were conducted for 16 weeks. Improvement on immediate- and near-transfer measures supported the utility of solution instruction. Improvement on near- and far-transfer measures revealed the added contribution of explicitly teaching for transfer. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Readers' acquisition of the components of the text-lookback strategy.

Investigated the order in which the components of the text-lookback strategy are acquired in an experiment in which 100 5th-grade students at 2 reading proficiency levels (50 proficient and 50 less proficient readers) were asked to tutor 20 3rd-grade readers who acted as confederates in the study. As the younger students read a short expository text and answered 5 questions, tutor encouragement of text-lookback behaviors was observed; tutees had been trained not to initiate any lookbacks. For both proficient and less proficient readers, the order of acquisition posited and confirmed statistically was as follows: undifferentiated rereading (general reaccessing of text to locate unrecalled information), text sampling (scanning the text, rereading only the relevant segments), question differentiation (deciding which questions cue reaccessing), and text manipulation (integrating information across sentences to answer questions). Reader proficiency groups differed in the proportion of members having acquired particular strategic components. This finding confirms that use of the components of the lookback strategy is positively related to global reading performance level. (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Examining the effects of a comprehensive writing program on the writing performance of middle school students with learning disabilities in written expression.

Many students have difficulty in educational and employment settings because they have failed to master basic writing skills. Multiple-baseline across-tasks designs were used to evaluate the effects of the Comprehensive Writing Program (CWP), a multicomponent intervention, on the writing performance of all students (n = 17) from 3 9th-grade special education classrooms. The CWP included direct instruction, assignment choice, increased practice, group rewards, and individual feedback. Assessment procedures were used to collect data on 3 target skills: percentage of sentences that (a) were complete sentences, (b) contained adjectives, and (c) were compound sentences. Results suggest that the CWP increased students' performance on recently taught or retaught skills; however, not all increases were maintained. Discussion focuses on future applied and theoretical research designed to address limitations of the current study and to enhance the effectiveness of the CWP. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of small-group tutoring with and without validated classroom instruction on at-risk students' math problem solving: Are two tiers of prevention better than one?

This study assessed the effects of small-group tutoring with and without validated classroom instruction on at-risk students' math problem solving. Stratifying within schools, 119 3rd-grade classes were randomly assigned to conventional or validated problem-solving instruction (Hot Math, schema-broadening instruction). Students identified as at risk (n=243) were randomly assigned, within classroom conditions, to receive or not receive Hot Math tutoring. Students were tested on problem-solving and math applications measures before and after 16 weeks of intervention. Analyses of variance, which accounted for the nested structure of the data, revealed that the tutored students who received validated classroom instruction achieved better than the tutored students who received conventional classroom instruction (effect size=1.34). However, the advantage for tutoring over no tutoring was similar whether students received validated or conventional classroom instruction (effect sizes=1.18 and 1.13). Tutoring, not validated classroom instruction, reduced the prevalence of math difficulty. Implications for responsiveness-to-intervention prevention models and for enhancing math problem-solving instruction are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)