We examined how children with and without oral language (word-finding) difficulties (WFD) perform on oral reading (OR) versus silent reading recognition (SRR) tasks when reading the same words and how lexical factors influenced OR accuracy, error patterns, and nature of miscues. Primary-grade students were administered an experimental reading…

The International Resilience Project was intended to determine the multidimensional, reciprocal, and dynamic factors--and relationships of factors--that parents, teachers, caregivers, and children themselves use to promote resilience in children. The samples were 589 children and their caregivers from 14 countries: Lithuania, Russia, Costa Rica,…

Instructional strategies for successfully teaching concepts are found throughout the instructional design literature. These strategies primarily consist of presenting learners with definitions, examples, and non-examples. While examples are important presentation instruments, theorist suggests that examples should not be re-used in the assessment…

An angles teaching sequence was designed, in which students were guided to abstract a general concept from physical activities with concrete materials. The three design principles used were familiarity, similarity recognition, and reification. The resulting teaching sequence was tested in a field study involving 25 teachers of Grades 3-4. The data…

A survey of 220 educational speech-language pathologists investigated their perceived knowledge about traumatic brain injury (TBI) and preparedness to provide services to students with TBI. The majority reported a low level of perceived preparedness due to a lack of knowledge, a contention moderately supported by objective testing. (Author/CR)

Two experiments examined effects of a cognitive interview on 4- and 8-year-olds' correct recall and subsequent reporting of misinformation. Found that a cognitive interview elicited more correct details than a control interview. Eight-year-olds' reports were more complete than 4-year-olds', with more correct person, action, object, and location…

Explored the use of 5 and 11 year olds' artwork to investigate their knowledge of nonverbal communication and social distance. Children's drawings indicated that children recognize that strangers should be kept at a greater distance than friends; and children's age influenced their knowledge of nonverbal communication and social distance. (BB)

Investigates hypothesis that topic familiarity and assessed difficulty of a text correlate positively with performance on reading comprehension tests. A study of 177 advanced students of English for Specific Purposes indicates that students' subjective evaluation of the relative difficulty of a reading text is not always a reliable index of their…

Studied prior knowledge as a mediator of effectiveness of the elaborative interrogation strategy for 50 male and 50 female undergraduates in a learning task. The elaborative interpretation group had significantly greater matching scores on an associative memory test for animal information than the control group only for familiar animals. (SLD)

Investigates familiarity as a determinant of perceptions of group heterogeneity, the objective level of heterogeneity characteristic of the target group, and the tendency for perceivers to see social groups consistently with 182 Chinese and 182 American college students and some teachers. Cultural differences in judgments are explored. (SLD)

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between selected listener variables and musical preference of young students in Singapore. Based on the Leblanc 1982 model, gender, age, race, musical training and familiarity were chosen as independent variables. The data collected showed that musical preference was also influenced by…

While working with music teachers in training at the university level, the author learned how helpful it can be to model a curriculum that mirrors America's changing demographics. As a Native American who grew up on the Stockbridge-Munsee Indian Reservation, in central Wisconsin, she discovered that Native history and culture were absent from…

Children often perseverate, repeating prior behaviors when inappropriate. This work tested the roles of verbal labels and stimulus novelty in such perseveration. Three-year-old children sorted cards by one rule and were then instructed to switch to a second rule. In a basic condition, cards had familiar shapes and colors and both rules were stated…

The goal of the current research was to assess whether children can make strategic use of morphological relations among words to spell. French-speaking children in Grade 4 spelled three word types: (a) phonological words that had regular phoneme-grapheme correspondences, (b) morphological words that had silent consonant endings for which a…

Three studies investigated how 24-month-olds and adults resolve temporary ambiguity in fluent speech when encountering prenominal adjectives potentially interpretable as nouns. Children were tested in a looking-while-listening procedure to monitor the time course of speech processing. In Experiment 1, the familiar and unfamiliar adjectives…