Undoubtedly test anxiety is a troublesome condition found to be prevalent today among college students. Over the years various attempts have been made to explore how test anxiety influences academic achievement. This paper discusses the extent to which test anxiety affects academic achievement of college students, and the techniques found to be…

The heuristic model and measurement models guiding a proposed seven-year investigation of how children learn to comprehend what they read--and in particular how they comprehend science text--are described in this report. The report first offers a brief description of the heuristic model, which is based upon and extended from studies of effective…

To isolate the process deficits underlying a specific learning disability in mathematics achievement, 77 academically normal and 46 learning disabled (LD) students in second, fourth or sixth grade were presented 140 simple addition problems using a true-false reaction time verification paradigm. (The problems were on a video screen controlled by…

A 9-month study of a 1-year-old child's acquisition of the pronunciation of "camera" is presented. The data show that while the child can articulate and perceive all the phonological segments of the adult form, she uses an idiosyncratic child-based form when she spontaneously draws from her lexicon to produce an utterance, systematically modifying…

This paper provides an introduction to the Alberta Education Developmental Framework, and describes the provincial department's position on curriculum and the cognitive domain. Intended for use in designing and implementing instruction, the developmental framework delineates the developmental stages and processes through which students progress,…

After students recommended books by M. E. Kerr, such as "Is That You, Miss Blue?" and "Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack," a college teacher realized that Kerr's books contained memorable characters and were suitable for classroom use. Particularly useful was Kerr's 1983 nonfiction book, "Me, Me, Me, Me, Me," which recounts…

Children appear to interpret the "equals" sign as an operator ("adds up to") not a relational ("the same as") symbol--e.g., viewing equations like 13 = 7 + 6 or 8 = 8 as senseless. This study, a natural experiment, examined the effects of long-term instruction emphasizing a relational definition of "equals."…

A study was conducted to determine if instruction in schematic aspects of narratives would enhance children's knowledge of story constituents and their interrelationships and to assess the effect of instruction in narrative schema on the reading comprehension of average and below average readers. Subjects were 20 fourth grade students who had been…

Self-schemas are knowledge-structures that organize information relevant to the "self." Research has demonstrated that persons who are schematic (versus aschematic) for a particular trait process self-relevant information on that dimension more efficiently. To determine whether individual self-schemas are organized into relatively…

Three studies were conducted to investigate the development of the ability of individuals of varying ages to use macrorules for paraphrasing expository text. Macrorules were defined as the general rules of deletion, superordination, selection, and invention that underlie comprehension of prose. In the first study, 18 fifth grade, 16 seventh grade,…

After a short introductory chapter to this literature review on composing processes, the second chapter examines research that covers the timing and content of planning, planning subprocesses, employing planning strategies, and instruction in planning. Studies in the third chapter are divided into two sections, oral and written discourse…

The three-parameter logistic model discussed was used by CTB/McGraw-Hill in the development of the Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills, Form U (CTBS/U) and the Test of Cognitive Skills (TCS), published in the fall of 1981. The development, standardization, and scoring of the tests are described, particularly as these procedures were influenced by…

A study was conducted to determine whether students comprehend student-authored material more easily than the material of published authors. The Fry Readability Graph was used to estimate the readability of 8 published passages of 200-270 words, which varied from grade 5 through grade 10. The topic of each passage was listed and used in a 2-day…

Noting that the Neurological Impress Method (NIM) of reading instruction has been shown to be an effective intervention strategy for use with remedial readers, this paper examines the theoretical and empirical validity of NIM techniques. The discussion focuses on (1) a procedural description of the technique, which involves having student and…

Fourteen research reports related to mathematics education are abstracted and analyzed. Five studies deal with aspects of mathematics instruction, and there are four reports each on mathematics achievement and on two cognitive processes. The remaining items concern calculators, attitudes, and aptitude-treatment interaction. Research related to…