Recent literature suggests it is not students' backgrounds, but schools' response to students' backgrounds that determines students' success in school. School practices and policies adopted in response to student performance in attendance, academics, and behavior also have a significant impact on students' decision to leave school before…

Contributors discuss (1) the role of teacher explanation, (2) packaged teaching programs, and (3) motivating children to write poetry. (FL)

Describes a naturalistic study of preschool children's interactions with software, peers, and teachers as they explored computers. Results are presented as suggestions for teachers, program planners, and researchers, and address the issue of accommodating individual differences, planning for the role of teachers and aides, and keeping an open…

Filmed 30 infants monthly between one and seven months of age where mothers or unfamiliar women responded to their cries by picking up or talking to the infants. Results suggest that infants develop conditioned associations among distress-relief patterns by one month, and cognitive expectations by four or five months. (Author/BB)

Examines 200 Barbadian parents' and 100 teachers' perceptions of restrictive and coercive strategies for students taking the Common Entrance Examination. Generally, parents were significantly less likely than teachers to view the strategies as undesirable and/or counter-productive. Implications for parents as a potential educational reform…

Explores briefly the New Criticism that dominated literature instruction until recently and then provides an overview of reader response theory and how response approaches can be used in the classroom to enhance reading. (NKA)

Three rating scales--with all positive or all negative wording, or a mixture of both--were administered to 522 children in grades four through six. The results indicated that it was difficult for students to indicate agreement by disagreeing with a negative statement. This affected test validity. Author/GDC)

First-, third-, fifth-, and tenth-grade children listened to eight stories designed to elicit prosocial or self-protective display rules. Children predicted protagonists' verbal and facial expressions to emotion-laden situations. Findings indicated knowledge of control of emotional displays increases between first and fifth grades, but then levels…

Provides a background of response theory, two Canadian perspectives on response theory, a description of transactional response theory and response-centered curriculum, a discussion of the concepts of participant and spectator roles in literature and of the idea of narration and storying as literature, and a discussion of analysis and criticism.…

Responses of 483 Anglo and 328 Mexican American male and female university sophomore students to Jourard's Self Disclosure Questionnaire were greatly affected by examiner gender, ethnicity--Anglo or Mexican American--and style of administration--nondirective, directive, or neutral. Effects were compounded when respondents were of different gender…

This article advances an attributional theory of motivation and emotion, with achievement strivings as the theoretical focus. Causes of success and failure share three common properties: locus, stability, and controllability. Stability of causes influences changes in expectancy of success. Expectancy and affect guide motivated behavior.…

Description of course on principles of instructional design includes model for message design which relates instructional events in computer assisted instruction to learner's cognitive processes. Guidelines cover attracting attention, specifying objectives, activating knowledge, presenting information effectively, guiding learning, eliciting…

Describes a teaching method that uses Molly Bloom's soliloquy from James Joyce's "Ulysses" to teach punctuation to freshman writing students. Argues that the assignment helps students discover their power as orderers. (EL)

Presents arguments to researching response to poetry that attempts to track the process as it occurs. Describes procedures designed to ensure that the responses that are recorded come close to representing the process by which adolescent readers go about making sense of a poem. (EL)

Describes an individualized reading program called First Reader, which allows student tastes to be used and offers a nonthreatening environment in which to talk about a novel. (CRH)