There is much debate as to the extent and nature of functional specialization within the different subregions of the prefrontal cortex. The current study was undertaken to investigate the effect of damage to medial prefrontal cortex subregions in the rat. Rats were trained on two biconditional discrimination tasks, one auditory and one visual, in…

Comprehension of chance language, such as is found in newspapers, is a fundamental aspect of statistical literacy. In this study, students' understandings of chance language were explored through responses to two items in surveys administered to 2,726 students from grades 5 to 11. One item involved evaluating the chance expressed in phrases from…

The purpose of this study is to examine whether a new construct "Assumed-Competence based on undervaluing others (AC)" could be a determinant of anger and sadness for contemporary Japanese adolescents. A set of questionnaires was administered to 584 high school students, who rated ACS-2 (Assumed-Competence Scale, second version), Rosenberg's…

The purpose of this research was to examine the spontaneous responsiveness and attention during picture-book reading in 18-month-old to 24-month-old children from at-risk backgrounds. Twenty-five, 18-month-old children in an early intervention program were randomly assigned to a read condition or play condition for six months. At each seventh…

The authors examined associations among parental and child adjustment, child syncope, somatic, and school problems. Participants were children (N = 56) ages 7-18 years with syncope. Measures included syncope severity, parental distress, and children's internalizing symptoms. For children diagnosed negative for neurocardiogenic syncope (NCS), their…

This instructional study investigated the effects of two approaches to fostering elementary students' comprehension of literature. Participants were 54 third-grade students in 2 classrooms in a linguistic and culturally diverse, urban elementary school. Students read two folktales, receiving a Scaffolded Reading Experience (SRE) unit with one…

When Pope John Paul II visited Immaculate Conception School in Los Angeles 18 years ago, he came with a message of support for Roman Catholic education and with rosaries for the students. This article tells the story of schools that took time to remember the legacy of the 84-year-old leader of the Catholic Church, who died April 2. Teachers and…

This study employed problem-based learning for project work in a year 9 biology class. The purpose of the study was to investigate (a) students' inspirations for their self-generated problems and questions, (b) the kinds of questions that students asked individually and collaboratively, and (c) how students' questions guided them in knowledge…

What science-related knowledge is actually used by nurses in their day-to-day clinical reasoning when attending patients? The study investigated the knowledge-in-use of six acute-care nurses in a hospital surgical unit. It was found that the nurses mainly drew upon their professional knowledge of nursing and upon their procedural understanding…

This paper presents an examination of the use of Rasch modelling in a major research project, "Improving Middle Years Mathematics and Science" (IMYMS). The project has generated both qualitative and quantitative data, with much of the qualitative data being ordinal in nature. Reporting the results of analyses for a range of audiences necessitates…

The basic theory of Rasch measurement applies to situations where a person has a certain level of a trait being investigated, and this level of ability is what determines (to within a measurement error) how well the person does on each item in a test. This paper responds to frequent suggestions from colleagues that the use of Rasch measurement…

After reading text such as Amanda was bouncing all over because she had taken too many tranquilizing sedatives in one day, young adult readers frequently fail to report that they noticed the anomalous noun phrase (NP). Although young readers of all skill levels are susceptible to this kind of shallow semantic processing, less-skilled readers are…

Empirical research shows that poor emotional competence is an early risk factor for the development of psychopathology. Numerous school-based prevention programs have been developed with the goal of decreasing behavior problems. Several of these programs include a discrete emotions component, but none of them are solely or primarily guided by…

Research on the executive functions of the brain supports a constructivist, experiential approach to teaching and learning.

This chapter reviews the literature on survey fatigue and summarizes a research project that indicates that administering multiple surveys in one academic year can significantly suppress response rates in later surveys. (Contains 4 tables.)