Examines how children (ages 6-7 and 10-11) interpret and respond to representations of sexual behavior on television and how they define what is appropriate for themselves and for children in general. Examines, through discourse analysis, how children's discussions of these issues serve as a form of "identity work," through which they…

Despite training, professionals sometimes make serious errors in risky decision making. The authors investigated judgments and decisions for 9 hypothetical patients at 3 levels of cardiac risk, comparing student and physician groups varying in domain-specific knowledge. Decisions were examined regarding whether they deviated from guidelines, how…

Results of tests of students' skills and knowledge conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the state accountability tests required by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program should not be compared. The two tests are based on different standards and have different measurement functions and judging the results of one…

This study examined the extent to which student engagement is associated with a traditional assessment of student knowledge. In this study, ETS Business Major Field Test (MFT) scores were compared to student's self-reported survey responses to specific questions on the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Areas of the NSSE survey such as…

Sociologists have long reflected on what should be taught in sociology. In recent years, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) has produced several important publications on key principles and learning goals for the introductory course. However, little current work has systematically examined what peer-recognized leaders in the field…

Objective and Participants: The authors compared nontraditional college students' knowledge and perceptions of HIV/AIDS and sexual practices with previously reported results about traditional students. Methods: Nontraditional students completed an online survey with questions based on national HIV/AIDS surveys. Traditional students completed the…

Adults aged 65 and younger make up a significant proportion of nursing-home residents. To date, however, there is no research examining their quality of life (QOL), including how their perceptions of QOL compare to those of older nursing-home residents. This study used a multidimensional approach to (a) assess the QOL of younger nursing-home…

Three studies examined the domain of concepts about dinosaurs in order to assess how the domain might be structured in 4- through 7-year-old children's representations and to explore how the knowledge might be used. Findings indicated that significant differences exist in the way expert and novice children's representations are structured.…

Eighty-one randomly selected cotton producers in Lauderdale County were interviewed for the purposes of: (1) characterizing those in different cotton yield groups, (2) determining which practices were being used by those in different yield groups, and (3) identifying some of the factors influencing the farmers to use or not to use the 12 practices…

The purpose of this report was to investigate tenth grade students' attitudes toward environmental quality and health knowledge. A tenth grade vocational agriculture class, a tenth grade biology class, and a random sample of all tenth grade students from each of twelve randomly selected Pennsylvania schools were used in the study. The sample was…

Noting that little is known about young children's informal mathematical knowledge and that such knowledge may contribute to national differences in mathematics achievement, this study examined Taiwanese and American preschool children's informal mathematical knowledge and the type of mathematical activities they encounter in everyday life. Data…

Enumerates the issues which are at the core of the debate over the New Sociology of Education--the nature of the epistemological foundation, the adequacy of phenomenology as a basis for structural analysis, the stratification of knowledge and the power of elites in determining curriculum, and the nature of the political action implied. For journal…

Two experiments examined how 5- and 10-year-olds revised their category representations when exposed to exemplars that were congruent or incongruent with existing knowledge. Findings indicated that judgments about feature co-occurrent within the learned category were influenced by both stereotypical beliefs and exemplar observation. Stereotypical…

This study found that the level of health knowledge of 139 hearing Australian students, ages 12-18, was superior to that of 66 hearing-impaired students. However, health knowledge of hearing-impaired students increased markedly from grade 8 to grade 12, so that by grade 12 they were achieving only marginally below their hearing peers. (Author/JDD)

Examined the relationship between counting knowledge and computational skills for 13 mathematically disabled (MD) first graders who showed a delay in acquiring mathematical skills and 24 nondisabled first graders. MD children's immature counting knowledge and poor skills at detecting counting errors underlay their poor computational skills on an…