A profile of motivation,self-perception,and achievement in black urban elementary students

The purpose of this study was to develop a profile of a sample of black urban elementary students based on motivational tendencies, self-perceptions, and achievement. The article explores the intrinsic motivation and self-perceptions of these students and seeks to find relationships among these qualities and academic achievement and attendance. The results of the study present a profile that reflects a lack of social acceptance of vocabulary skills and a lack of social acceptance of preferring challenging work. Perception of scholastic competence was related to behavioral conduct but not to global self-worth. The results supported previous research indicating that some black students perceive schooling and academic success as inconsistent with their racial-cultural goals. Implications for urban schools are presented.This is a revised version of a paper presented in April 1990 at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Boston, MA.     

Study techniques differentially influence the delayed judgment-of-learning accuracy of adolescent children and college-aged adults

The ways in which adult learners study information influences their judgment-of-learning (JOL) accuracy (e.g., Koriat et al. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 131(2), 147-162, 2002). The present study extends this investigation to adolescent children to determine whether developing learners’ metacognitive monitoring is similarly influenced by different study techniques. In two experiments, we examined JOL accuracy in adolescent children (ages 11 to 12) and college-aged adults. Across both experiments, we employed a standard delayed-JOL paradigm in which three groups of participants, differing in type of study technique, encoded weakly-related word pairs. One group studied the word pairs twice (study practice). A second group studied with the instruction to generate a word that linked the two members of the word pair together (elaborative encoding). The final group studied word pairs and then took an immediate cued-recall test with feedback (retrieval practice). In children and adults, retrieval practice led to better JOL accuracy as compared to study practice. Children differed from adults in how elaborative encoding influenced JOL accuracy. For adults, elaborative encoding resulted in better JOL accuracy than study practice; however, for children, JOL accuracy did not differ between the two groups. Our results suggest that encoding processes influence delayed-JOL accuracy in both age-groups.     

Epidemiology of child homicide in Jefferson County, Alabama

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to present the epidemiology of homicide among children younger than 6 years of age in Jefferson County, Alabama. This study focused on obtaining great detail on homicides and suspicious deaths occurring within a fixed population. METHODS: For purposes of this study, cases included Jefferson County deaths attributed to "homicide" or that were "undetermined" as noted in the coroner files among children younger than 6 years of age who were born and died between January 1, 1988 and December, 31, 1998. Victim and offender characteristics were obtained from the Jefferson County Coroner/Medical Examiner Office records. Environmental factors and circumstances surrounding the death were noted as well. RESULTS: The 53 study subjects were mainly female (55%), Black (69%), younger than 2 years of age (85%), had single mothers (38%), and a history of abuse (53%). Offenders were more likely to be male (64%), Black (73%), and a parent of the victim (53%). Homicides primarily resulted from an angry impulse (61%), with hands the most common weapon (61%). CONCLUSIONS: The majority of deaths in this study occurred among children younger than age 2, with a high proportion of fatalities among Black children of unmarried mothers. The offender most often knew the victim, with half of all homicides and two-thirds of all infant homicides involving a parent. More than half of the homicides resulted from an angry impulse, while the most common scenario for deaths with undetermined intent involved the caretaker finding the child unresponsive.     

Resolution of a Regression Paradox in Pretest-Posttest Designs

Regression to the mean (RTM) of individuals is the tendency for extreme individuals to become less extreme on remeasurement; RTM of group means describes this same tendency among group means. Under the classical test model, in pretest-posttest designs where subjects are selected on the basis of extreme values at the pretest, RTM of group means will always occur for the attribute used to select extreme subjects. For other attributes, however, RTM of group means requires a positive correlation between that attribute's measurement error and the measurement error of the attribute used in the selection. Thus, while all attributes will evidence RTM of individuals, extreme groups do not always regress to the mean. RTM depends most fundamentally on the magnitude of the pretest measurement error.     

Many Ways of Knowing: Creating classroom cultures in London's East End

Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century we have been led to believe that there is an inevitable link between poverty and early literacy and learning difficulties, and since the end of World War II, poverty has been translated into notions of cognitive or linguistic deficit. Teachers have turned to 'experts', often academics or those responsible for official education reports, for solutions. Each decade has brought a different group of experts, often vigorously denouncing the last. This paper argues that teachers and the public have been hoodwinked into believing that answers for success lie with any particular methods, materials or even parental involvement programmes. Rather than turning to 'experts', readers are invited to listen to the voices of successful learners across the last century in London's East End, as they reflect upon what really mattered for them during those early years in school.     

Condom Carnival: feasibility of a novel group intervention for decreasing sexual risk

Young people who engage in unprotected sex are at risk of negative consequences. The current study explored pre-post assessment data from 124, mostly Black, young people (M age = 19.6, SD = 2.8) attending an educational and vocational training programme who participated in the Condom Carnival, a novel, brief, interactive, peer-led, culturally tailored, sexual risk reduction group intervention. Condom Carnival activities provided practice negotiating condom use and using condoms correctly, instruction on safe lubricant use, and opportunities to dispel myths regarding condom size and breakage. We examined the preliminary impact of the Condom Carnival in increasing participants’ condom-related self-efficacy, lubricant safety awareness, and condom-related behavioural intentions and behaviour likelihood. Despite previous exposure to prevention efforts, participants reported significant increases in lubricant safety awareness (p < 0.001) and intentions to carry a condom in the next year (Z = ?2.05, p = 0.04). Although participants reported high condom-related self-efficacy and intentions to use a condom, only three-quarters of young people endorsed intentions to always carry a condom. Findings indicate the need to explore the gap between intentions to use and carry condoms and to develop effective strategies to increase condom carrying among young people. Further assessment of the Condom Carnival as an add-on intervention to enhance sexual risk reduction efforts among youth is warranted.     

Cooperative learning in computer-based instruction

High equipment and materials costs, limited access to computers for instruction in many schools, and the success of cooperative learning strategies in traditional classroom instruction have prompted researchers to examine the potential of cooperative computer-based instruction (CBI). In this article, recent research on cooperative CBI is reviewed and findings related to achievement, patterns of study, social interchange, motivation, and gender are discussed. In addition, guidelines on the implementation of cooperative CBI that have been gleaned from the literature are presented.This paper was prepared with partial support from MECC/University of Minnesota Center for Study of Educational Technology, and presented at the AECT Annual Convention, January 31–February 4, 1990, Anaheim, CA.