This teacher-research study examines the roles of talk and metaphorical representation in the construction of personal and social literary interpretation. Over three years, the investigator collected data from fourth-grade children's sketched interpretations about literature, their written commentaries, and conversations that occurred before,…

In unidimensional absolute identification tasks, participants identify stimuli that vary along a single dimension. Performance is surprisingly poor compared with discrimination of the same stimuli. Existing models assume that identification is achieved using long-term representations of absolute magnitudes. The authors propose an alternative…

In contrast to typically developing children, children with autism rarely exhibit cooperative social behavior. To examine whether this problem reflects global developmental delays or autism-specific deficits, the present study compared cooperation, emotional understanding, personality characteristics, and social behavior of 10 children with autism…

Science teaching environments are social environments, and teachers' emotions interact with their science teaching in powerful ways. To value the teacher is to value the whole person, not just the intellect. In this paper, a theorization of teacher emotion in science teaching is developed which illustrates the role of emotion in establishing and…

Intrapersonal and familial effects of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) were investigated by interviewing 10 female partners of male survivors. Consensual qualitative research analysis (C. Hill, B. Thompson, & E. Nutt Williams, 1997) yielded 13 domains describing male partner, female partner, couple, and family functioning. Findings concerning…

In this survey study of 430 undergraduates, elements of the social competencies and interpersonal processes model (B. Mallinckrodt, 2000) were tested. Two social competencies were hypothesized to mediate the direct effects of 2 independent variables, attachment anxiety and avoidance, on 2 outcomes, psychological distress and perceived social…

Eight independent variables (differential item functioning [DIF] detection method, purification procedure, item response model, mean latent trait difference between groups, test length, DIF pattern, magnitude of DIF, and percentage of DIF items) were manipulated, and two dependent variables (Type I error and power) were assessed through…

In this investigation young adolescent students (N=181) engaged in an interactive computer reading task. The aim was to explore sequences of students' affective responses to expository texts by identifying their character, intensity and their relationship with further text processing. Affective responses were measured using probes consisting of…

This paper presents a cognitive social-psychological theoretical framework on emotions, derived from Richard Lazarus, to understand how teachers' identity can be affected in a context of reforms. The emphasis of this approach is on the cognitive-affective processes of individual teachers, enabling us to gain a detailed understanding of what…

Michael Hand's pithy and challenging essay (Hand, 2003) offers a neat, clear and powerful argument against "faith schools". I am in considerable sympathy with Hand's position. However, I think his argument can be strengthened, and weaknesses in it remedied or avoided. In this brief note, I offer some modest suggestions, which are intended as…

Adam Swift objects to private schools on the grounds of equal opportunity and efficiency, and to both private and selective public schools on the grounds of solidarity and improving the academic achievement of less advantaged students. I argue that private schools are not inefficient, and that a meritocratic ideal of equality of opportunity in…

American schools have debated the merits of a national canon since the inception of English as a subject a century ago. In earlier years, the mission of the language arts was much more elitist and hierarchical. English was a subject that taught the great works, so that aspiring students could be familiar with the standard pantheon of authors and…

This study assesses undergraduate knowledge of aging, distinguishing between types of deficits (ignorance vs. misinformation) and content areas as delineated by a biopsychosocial framework. Knowledge is examined as an outcome of taking an aging elective, while accounting for course rating and knowledge retention. A diverse body of UCLA…

Forgetting in long-term memory, as measured in a recall or a recognition test, is faster for items encoded more recently than for items encoded earlier. Data on forgetting curves fit a power function well. In contrast, many connectionist models predict either exponential decay or completely flat forgetting curves. This paper suggests a…

All languages rely to some extent on word order to signal relational information. Why? We address this question by exploring communicative and cognitive factors that could lead to a reliance on word order. In Study 1, adults were asked to describe scenes to another using their hands and not their mouths. The question was whether this home-made…