Academic engagement of elementary school children with learning disabilities

Variability of attention-to-task and its relation to instructional contexts for children with learning disabilities was investigated. Twenty-four mainstreamed children were observed in both the regular class and the resource room. Student behaviors relating to academic engagement and the situational contexts in which they occurred were coded. Significant differences in rate of engagement were found for classroom setting, type of instruction, and level of peer involvement, indicating that degree of attending is not stable but a function of the context in which it occurs. Implications for the assessment of attentional problems and instructional practices, especially as related to the resource room program, are discussed.     

Rehearsal dynamics in elementary school children

Several studies on free recall suggest that processes responsible for recall are analogous to processes responsible for rehearsal. In children, the relationship between cumulative rehearsal and recall performance has been proven to be critical; however, the locus of the effect of rehearsal is not yet fully understood. To unfold the mechanisms that come into play in an overt rehearsal free recall task, we assessed rehearsal and recall sequences in children between 8 and 10 years of age. These sequences give information about the context in which items are repeated and rearranged throughout the list and subsequently recalled. Rehearsal sequences consisted mainly of items from neighboring list positions in their original temporal order. The same characteristics were true for recall sequences. Qualitatively, order effects during study and recall did not differ over age groups. However, in older children who were using cumulative rehearsal more intensively, successive rehearsal and recall of items in their original order was more pronounced. Therefore, we suggest that a main feature of item rehearsal with regard to facilitating recall is the strengthening of interitem associations based on the temporal order within a list and that this characteristic develops with age.     

Behavior problems in elementary school children

Two-year follow-up data for an ostensibly normal sample of children who had been previously characterized on a number of behavior problem dimensions by their teachers and peers were analyzed. In addition, 1-year follow-up data were presented for a group of extreme behavior children from the same school. The behavior dimensions of Distractibility and Conduct Problem were fairly stable over 2 years for girls and boys. In addition, Inadequacy—Immaturity was stable for girls and may mark more severe behavior problems for young girls. Behavior problems of young girls were more predictive of later achievement difficulties while behavior problems of boys were more prdictive of peer and teacher difficulty. Finally, teacher's clinical judgment was demonstrated to be useful for indexing behavior for hyperactive boys.Portions of this paper were presented at the New England Educational Research Organization Meeting, Provincetown, Massachusetts, May 1975. The authors wish to thank Dr. Raymond Pressman and the teachers of Hillside Elementary School, Niakayuna, New York, for providing valuable assistance in support of this study. This study was supported in part by the Research Foundation of New York, Grant number 020-7315-A.     

The development of moral orientation in elementary school children

While much research has focused on issues of justice in children's moral learning, little is known about children's use of other moral orientations in solving moral problems. A study was conducted with children drawn from Grades 1, 3, and 5 (total n=54). Fables were used as the moral dilemmas, since previous research had shown that they could be solved from either a justice or a care orientation. In individual interviews, children were asked how they would solve the problems in the fables, whether there was a different solution, and what the best solution (justice or care) would be. They were then asked to explain the logic of the solution they offered. The results from the study showed that (a) children tended to adopt a care orientation as their first solution and to consider it the best solution, (b) there were no differences between first- and third-grade boys and girls, (c) solutions involving violence and tricks appeared among the fifth-grade boys only, and (d) the ability to explain the logic of both orientations to the fables problem was correlated with children's use of abstract reasoning skills on beginning formal operational tasks and with perspective-taking ability.We would like to thank the principal and teachers of the Thetford Elementary School, Thetford, Vermont, for their participation in this project. We are also grateful to Elizabeth Hoffman, Dan Parish, Kathleen Lambert, and Heather Caldwell for their help with data collection, to Carol Kottmeier and Mary Varanese for their coding of the Selman data, and to Ann Huebner, Kay Johnston, Sharry Langdale, Michael W. Pratt, and Lawrence Walker for their comments on the paper. Support for the research was provided by Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College.     

The Affect in Play Scale: confirmatory factor analysis in elementary school children

The aim of this paper was to study the construct validity of the Affect in Play Scale, an empirically based measure of pretend play, in a group of 519 Italian children ages 6 to 10 years. In confirmatory factor analysis, a correlated two-factor structure with a cognitive and an affective factor was identified. Possible differences in factor scores by sex and age were investigated but no significant differences were found.     

Second language learning in elementary and high school students

Abstract

A cross-sectional approach covering an age range of 10 years was used to compare the developmental changu in picture naming md number naming of 77 high scbool md 74 elementary students who came from Germany to Sweden. For the two different groups of students, length of residcoce in Swedcn was the main independent variable and reaction time on simple naming tasks of pictures and numbers in German and Swedish was the dependent variable. The results provide evidence that elementuy school students achieved a balanced form of bilingualism 2 years earlier than high school students on the picture naming task. Naming two-digit numbers was shown to be a relatively difficult task for elementary school children, as indiated by markedly prolonged response times. Despite this fact, after about 4 years of residence in Sweden, both groups of students reached language ballaced on this task in that they showed identical response times in both languages. The results on the picture naming task were taken as support for the optimal age hypothesis.     

Gender differences in attributions about microcomputer learning in elementary school

To investigate whether girls' attributions about computer use were more likely to follow a pattern of learned helplessness, boys' and girls' attributions about a computerized drill-and-practice task and a tutorial program were assessed. Factor analysis of responses on an attribution questionnaire revealed three factors that differed across gender and across task. Multiple regression, using exposure time, group size, attributions, and interactions to predict posttest scores, showed different patterns for boys and girls and between tasks. For the drill-and-practice task, girls benefited from increased exposure time, and attributions to ease of task and ability predicted performance for both boys and girls. For the tutorial task, increased exposure time did not benefit either sex. Girls, however, benefitted from working in larger groups, while boys benefitted from working in smaller groups. Attributions to luck, as well as perceptions of ability and ease of task, predicted posttest scores. However, for girls, attributions to luck predicted higher scores, while for boys, attributions to luck were negatively correlated with performance. Implications for including appropriate feedback to encourage a mastery approach in computer learning, as well as optimal group size and group composition for positive attributional style and academic success, are discussed.This research was supported by Concordia University and the Fonds Pour la Formation des Chercheurs et l'Aide a la Recherche (Grant EQ-2951), Government of Quebec, Canada.The authors wish to thank Ms. Patricia Peters for assistance with the statistical analysis, and Dr. Philip Abrami, for his contribution to the project.     

Self-regulation and academic achievement in elementary school children

Self-regulation is a key construct in children's healthy and adaptive development. In this chapter, the authors situate self-regulation in a theoretical context that describes its underlying components that are most important for early school success: flexible attention, working memory, and inhibitory control. The authors review evidence that supports substantive links between these aspects of self-regulation and academic achievement in young children. They also discuss methodological challenges in reliably and validly assessing these skills (involving measures that are biased, are not applicable across broad age ranges, or triangulated) and describe some recent advances in measures of self-regulation (involving the NIH Toolbox or the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders assessment) that are reliable, ecologically valid, and predictive of children's school achievement.     

Prevalence of behavioral symptoms in rural elementary school children

Third- and fourth grade children attending rural midwestem elementary schools were assessed for the presence of fiftyfive behavior symptoms. In general, prevalence rates were higher for boys and reflected behavioral patterns commonly associated with conduct problems and immaturity. More neurotic forms of behavior were reported for girls. Additionally, an increase in symptoms per sex across grade level was found with fourth grade girls showing an increase common to the conduct disorder cluster.     

Syllogistic reasoning in Puerto Rican bilingual elementary school children

The purpose of the present study was to measure the effects of language proficiency and grade (age) on the reasoning of Puerto Rican bilingual children in elementary school. 20 syllogisms were administered, 10 in English and 10 in Spanish, and accuracy of and strategy for solution were examined. Solutions were more often accurate, and the proportion of theoretical explanations given for them was higher in Spanish. Differences by grade were not significant except a higher proportion of theoretical explanations were given by children in Grade 5 for syllogisms in Spanish.     

Behavioral self-management in story writing with elementary school children

The effect of self-management procedures on objective writing responses and on the subjectively assessed quality of children's writing was investigated. All experimental procedures were applied to each of the 37 children in a regular Grade 3 class, and 14 of these children were randomly selected for data collection. Following baseline conditions, self-assessment plus self-recording of writing responses was introduced. This did not increase the number of sentences, number of different action words, or number of different describing words, or improve the quality of the stories. Self-determined and self-administered reinforcement was added to the self-assessment and self-recording procedures contingent on each of the writing responses in turn. Rates of responding were substantially increased and the stories received higher subjective ratings of quality from two independent judges. An increase in on-task behavior was correlated with self-reinforcement of writing responses.     

Causal relationships among academic delay of gratification, motivation, and self-regulated learning in elementary school children

Academic delay of gratification refers to the postponement of immediate rewards by students and the pursuit of more important, temporally remote academic goals. A path model was designed to identify the causal relationships among academic delay of gratification and motivation, self-regulated learning strategies (as specified in the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire), and grades among 386 Chinese elementary school children. Academic delay of gratification was found to be positively related to motivation and metacognition. Cognitive strategy, resource management, and grades mediated these two factors and were indirectly related to academic delay of gratification.     

The benefit of retrieval practice over elaborative restudy in primary school vocabulary learning

The testing effect is the phenomenon that retrieval practice of learning material after studying enhances long-term retention more than restudying. We examined retrieval practice in primary school vocabulary learning in two experiments. Nine-year-old children studied word definitions and completed exercises according to three learning conditions: pure restudy, elaborative restudy or retrieval practice. Children in the pure restudy condition reread and partly copied the definitions. In the elaborative restudy condition children reread the definitions and connected semantically related words to the target words. Children in the retrieval practice condition recalled the words based on their definitions. Overall, on the fill-in-the-blank test after one week children in the retrieval practice condition outperformed children in the other conditions, but on the multiple-choice test there were no differences. Retrieval practice may be effective for primary school vocabulary learning, but there is uncertainty about the practical value and the magnitude of the retrieval practice effect.     

The development of strategy use in elementary school children: working memory and individual differences

The current study tested the development of working memory involvement in children's arithmetic strategy selection and strategy efficiency. To this end, an experiment in which the dual-task method and the choice/no-choice method were combined was administered to 10- to 12-year-olds. Working memory was needed in retrieval, transformation, and counting strategies, but the ratio between available working memory resources and arithmetic task demands changed across development. More frequent retrieval use, more efficient memory retrieval, and more efficient counting processes reduced the working memory requirements. Strategy efficiency and strategy selection were also modified by individual differences such as processing speed, arithmetic skill, gender, and math anxiety. Short-term memory capacity, in contrast, was not related to children's strategy selection or strategy efficiency.     

The elementary school: training ground for sex role stereotypes

“Sexism starts with kindergarten activities in which little girls are directed fo the housekeeping corner, while boys are steered toward blocks and trucks.”