The Sixth Annual Children and the Media Conference, hosted by Children Now, focused on the media's role and potential influence on boys. This report highlights the thinking of participating advocates, academics, entertainment industry leaders, and children. Following excerpts from a keynote address by William Pollack of Harvard Medical School, the…

A survey of academic reference librarians in North Carolina provided data for an examination of differences in survey administration on paper and the World Wide Web. Research via the Internet is becoming more attractive for many researchers, but the effects of this medium upon research outcomes have been little explored. This study examined in…

Intended for teachers, this workbook uses 20 well-known children's books as models to teach expository and narrative writing skills. The workbook teaches students about brainstorming, focus, organization, elaboration, and writing conventions with readily-available quality children's literature, such as "When I Was Young in the…

This report discusses research commissioned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in order to evaluate prototypes of digital public television programming. There were two phases of research, the first using exclusively linear demonstrations of interactive public television, and the second demonstrating computer simulations of three digital…

Children who are teased on a school bus, in class, or during recess often do not want to return to school. Unfortunately, teasing can occur anywhere, and it is difficult to prevent--despite the best efforts of parents, teachers, and school administrators to create a more cooperative atmosphere. This Digest discusses different types of teasing…

Writing teachers notice how students who succeed with their written projects often do so after they have moved to a kind of anger either with themselves or the project, with external stimuli, or with a general sense of injustice. They are stimulated by the emotion to creative problem solving, and as an effect, they may succeed at eliminating the…

Defining emotional competence as the demonstration of self-efficacy in emotion-eliciting social transactions, this paper presents a model of emotional competence that explores the factors and skills contributing to the development of a mature emotional response that supports an individual's social goals. The paper first describes the primary…

Book Club started over 12 years ago with the goal of creating an alternative context for reading instruction--one that would get students excited about reading and discussing books. Since then, Book Club's combination of excellent literature, relevant writing activities, and student-led discussion groups has proven effective in classrooms. This…

Oprah Winfrey is one of the wealthiest and most powerful entertainers operating in the media today. More than mere celebrity, however, she represents the notion of the heroic for her fans. In a sense, she operates as a television evangelist offering advice on secular issues of the day. This paper explores Oprah's role in influencing audiences to…

The years when a young child's language skills are "exploding" are the years between three and five. What can make a dramatic difference in a child's life is if parents take a few minutes a day to read to him or her. Reading to a child helps him or her become a successful reader. The child develops a sense of phonics and learns that stories have a…

Fifty core tasks that are generally performed by and important for secondary school beginning teachers are identified. Participants (n=297) were asked to judge the importance of each task. College students (n=476) were asked how confident they would be in doing these tasks as if they were beginning teachers. Rasch technique was used to scale the…

New ways are proposed to look at data from the Canadian School Achievement Indicators Program (SAIP) using item response theory (IRT) modeling. The focus is on the traditional test of the SAIP 1997 mathematics study. The test is two-staged in that the first 15 items, of median difficulty, were to be completed beforehand by all students as a…

The first purpose of this study is to do a comparative analysis in terms of the item difficulty and discrimination index between Mathematics Placement Test Form A and G. The results seem to suggest that items on both forms of the placement test are equally difficult. However, items on form A appear to have more discrimination power than items on…

Refugees to the United States are fleeing intolerable conditions and arriving to a new, very unfamiliar environment with many possibilities and sometimes conflicting expectations. Some are able to focus on their new life; others experience significant psychological, emotional, and physical adjustment problems. English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL)…

The allegory and fantasy in Madeleine L'Engle's four novels: "A Wrinkle in Time,""A Wind in the Door,""A Swiftly Tilting Planet," and "Many Waters," make the books powerful means for addressing the violence pervasive in the lives of so many young people. These books are a valuable curriculum addition because…