Aggressive Behavior of Nursery School Children and Adult Procedures in Dealing with Such Behavior

This study explored the influence of an excessively challenging reading task on middle school students’ motivation, attributions for failure, and persistence. In particular, the authors considered the possibility that relative topic interest might function as a buffer against the negative outcomes of excessive challenge. Students ranging from 10 to 14 years of age read a passage that was well beyond their current reading ability under 2 matched experimental conditions: high relative topic interest and low relative topic interest. Higher relative interest in the story topic buffered some of the negative influences of excessive challenge, sustaining interest/enjoyment of the task, and was related to fewer attributions for difficulty to any cause and persistence with the task.     

Futures for Children's Literature: Evolution or radical break?

As electronic media increasingly dominate narratives for children, not merely the form or the content but the very nature of narrative is changing. Future narratives for the 'computer reader', using the Internet and multimedia may seem to be no more nor less than individual, unassessable chaos. But these readers still need to subsist in a linear educational system and teachers will have to negotiate the profound intellectual shift that the mediation between old and new narratives implies. At the most basic level this will involve revising what we mean to be 'literate' and to be a 'good reader'.