Over the past two decades, scholars and practitioners in a variety of industries have considered work redesign among a constellation of strategies to promote employee recruitment and retention, development, motivation, and performance. Although educational policymakers in the middle to late 1990s shifted their attention to standards, systemic…

When students are working with hand held technology, such as graphics calculators, we usually only see the outcomes of their activities in the form of a contribution to a written solution of a mathematical problem. It is more difficult to capture their process of thinking or actions as they use the technology to solve a problem. In this paper we…

Relations among patterns of conceptual and procedural knowledge and grade were examined in 90 six- to eight-year-olds in order to explore addition and subtraction development. Conceptual knowledge was assessed by examining children's responses to pairs of problems reflecting various part-whole relations. Children solved related problems as part of…

Five experiments are reported in which the picture naming performance of bilingual speakers in a language-switching task was explored. In Experiment 1, Spanish learners of Catalan and Korean learners of Spanish were asked to perform a switching task between their first and dominant language (L1, Spanish or Korean) and their second language (L2,…

This study investigated the effect of phonological sensitivity of two comparable groups of grades 4 and 5 Chinese children, one a Putonghua-speaking group ("n" = 77) from Beijing and the other a Cantonese-speaking group ("n" = 80) from Hong Kong on English and Chinese pseudoword reading. It was hypothesized that the Beijing…

This study presents a continuing investigation of influences on outcomes achieved by students working in groups of three on tasks related to chance and data. Earlier research described final mathematical outcomes and identified 17 factors influencing three types of short-term outcomes for groups working in an "isolated setting." The current report…

Two experiments investigated whether young and old adults can temporarily remove information from a capacity-limited central component of working memory (WM) into another component, the activated part of long-term memory (LTM). Experiment 1 used a modified Sternberg recognition task (S. Sternberg, 1969); Experiment 2 used an arithmetic…

Establishing stability, defined as observing minimal measurement error in a test-retest assessment, is vital to validating psychometric tools. Correlational methods, such as Pearson product-moment, intraclass, and kappa are tests of association or consistency, whereas stability or reproducibility (regarded here as synonymous) assesses the…

This investigation examined the effects of authentic Francophone web sites on cultural learning at the intermediate level. Fifty-four students "surfed" eight web sites. A pre-posttest design assessed long-term gains in culture and the learning of practices, products, and perspectives from exposure to a curriculum with Internet activities. Eight…

This paper reports the effects of communication strategy instruction on second language performance (communicative success, speech rate, message abandonment) and on the use of communication strategies (paraphrase). Two classes of adult immigrants, enrolled in a full-time intermediate proficiency ESL program at a post-secondary institution in…

This paper focuses on the oral referential communication skills of hearing-impaired (HI) children. A task based on that used with language impaired children by Leinonen and Letts (1997) was used to assess the speaking and listening skills of 20 HI children (mean age=10;2 years; mean better ear average hearing loss=88.85 dBHL). Their performance…

This study investigates whether proficient second language (L2) speakers of Spanish and English use the same parsing strategies as monolinguals when reading temporarily ambiguous sentences containing a complex noun phrase followed by a relative clause, such as "Peter fell in love with the daughter of the psychologist who studied in California."…

This study examined the cognitive and neural development of attention switching using a simple forced-choice attention task and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Fourteen children and adults made discriminations among stimuli based on either shape or color. Performance on these trials was compared to performance during blocked trials…

The nature of the message used by children, 4 1/2 and 6 1/2 year-old, was studied in a spatial description task. Speaker and listener were separated from one another by an opaque screen, and had to exchange information. Speaker were asked to describe a board showing eight objects placed in a room, and listeners were instructed to draw a similar…

A new psychological test battery was designed to provide a much-needed comprehensive tool for assessing the perceptual and cognitive abilities of visually handicapped children in using active touch. The test materials consist of raised-line, raised-dot, raised-surface shapes and displays, and familiar and novel 3-D objects. The research used 20…