This paper describes a school-based asthma education program for rural elementary school nurses. The program was designed to teach school nurses in 7 rural counties in Maryland how to implement and to reinforce asthma management behaviors in children with asthma and their caregivers. Rural nurses who participated in this program increased their…

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate whether verbal fluency tasks may specifically induce relatively greater left than right hemispheric activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The effectiveness of the manipulation was evaluated by EEG, which was recorded during performance of the verbal fluency task and during two control…

This study investigated whether exposing Kindergarten children to metacognitive language results in a greater conceptual understanding of mental states, and increased production and comprehension of metacognitive vocabulary. Over a 4-week period, parents, teachers and graduate assistants read about 70 picture books to each participant (N=48, mean…

Metacognition and self-regulation are processes extremely relevant to education of persons with intellectual disabilities. They play a central role in specific limitations, such as outer-directedness and lack of strategy transfer, and are related to desirable educational objectives such as self-determination. Although computer-assisted training…

This study is part of a larger research project investigating the effects of using metalinguistic reflection integrated into a communicative class as a way of promoting second language acquisition among French-speaking Grade six (i.e. 10-11 year old) ESL learners (n=81). Even though metalinguistic reflection is thought to promote language…

The question of whether written genres can be learned through explicit teaching or can only be acquired implicitly through writing in authentic contexts remains unanswered. The question is complicated by the different parameters associated with teaching genre to first- or second-language learners, to children or adults, in settings in which the…

This longitudinal study examined the impact of participation in the federally funded Talent Search program at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The Talent Search program provides career exploration and counseling services to low-income students with the potential to be first-generation college graduates. Postsecondary education enrollment…

Chi (2005) proposed that students experience difficulty in learning about physics concepts such as light, heat, or electric current because they attribute to these concepts an inappropriate ontological status of material substances rather than the more veridical status of emergent processes. Conceptual change could thus be facilitated by training…

A core task in language acquisition is mapping words onto objects, actions, and events. Two studies investigated how children learn to map novel labels onto novel objects. Study 1 investigated whether 10-month-olds use both perceptual and social cues to learn a word. Study 2, a control study, tested whether infants paired the label with a…

This study compared the effectiveness of cognitive processing therapy for sexual abuse survivors (CPT-SA) with that of the minimal attention (MA) given to a wait-listed control group. Seventy-one women were randomly assigned to 1 of the 2 groups. Participants were assessed at pretreatment and 3 times during posttreatment: immediately after…

A new computerized testing system, which facilitates the use of short-answer-type testing, has been developed. In this system, the question of a multiple-choice problem is presented first, and the options appear briefly on the request of the test taker. The crux of this manipulation is to force students to solve the problem as if they were solving…

Evaluation research on vocational counseling in substance dependency treatment should distinguish between the effects of counselors and counseling methods on clients' employment outcomes. Three experimental designs permit investigation of possible confounds between these types of effects: (a) nested designs (each counselor delivers one counseling…

When an odor is paired with a delayed illness, rats acquire a relatively weak odor aversion. In contrast, rats develop a strong aversion to an olfactory cue paired with delayed illness if it is presented simultaneously with a gustatory cue. Such a conditioning effect has been referred to as taste-potentiated odor aversion learning (TPOA). TPOA is…

Learning strategy preferences depend upon circulating estrogen levels, with enhanced hippocampus-sensitive place learning coinciding with elevated estrogen levels. The effects of estrogen on strategy may be mediated by fluctuations in GABAergic function, given that inhibitory tone in the hippocampus is low when estrogen is high. We investigated…

Studies on human and animals shed light on the unique hippocampus contributions to relational memory. However, the particular role of each hippocampal subregion in memory processing is still not clear. Hippocampal computational models and theories have emphasized a unique function in memory for each hippocampal subregion, with the CA3 area acting…