Gifted children and visual-motor development: A comparison of Bender-Gestalt and VMI test performance

A sample of 63 gifted elementary-school students was administered the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test and the Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration for comparative purposes and to test Koppitz hypothesis that gifted students have advanced visual-motor development. Group results revealed no significant differences between the two tests, that they did correlate significantly, and that younger students in particular had advanced visual-motor development when tested using these two tools.     

Can the Barriers be Breached? Mature Women's Access to Higher Education

In the current climate of change and expansion in higher education, a danger exists that mature women students will not be given equitable access because the fundamental barriers to their full participation are not acknowledged. As a result, adequate support and academic facilities, such as childcare, woman‐friendly courses, teaching and assessment methods, sympathetic timetables and counselling services, are not provided for them. This paper examines the barriers that mature women wishing to enter higher education have to overcome, and suggests solutions that would facilitate the dismantling of these.     

Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning Constructs

Demographic variables, findings from the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (Schraw & Dennison, 1994), the Learning Strategies Survey (Kardash & Amlund, 1991), and the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, & McKeachie, 1991), as well as accuracy ratings of test performance, were examined in 2 studies. Findings indicated convergence of self-report measures of metacognition, significant correlations between metacognition and academic monitoring, negative correlations between self-reported metacognition and accuracy ratings, and positive correlations between metacognition and strategy use and metacognition and motivation. Limitations of the studies and implications for theory development and future research are discussed.     

Assessing Metacognitive Awareness

We constructed a 52-item inventory to measure adults′ metacognitive awareness. Items were classified into eight subcomponents subsumed under two broader categories, knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition. Two experiments supported the two-factor model. Factors were reliable (i.e., α = .90) and inter-correlated (r = .54). Experiment 2 reported the knowledge of cognition factor was related to pre-test judgments of monitoring ability and performance on a reading comprehension test, but was unrelated to monitoring accuracy. Implications for educational assessment and future research were discussed.     

Reading Attitudes and Literacy Skills in Prekindergarten and Kindergarten Children

The current study addressed the development of reading attitudes and their relationship to reading skills. Forty-one prekindergarten and kindergarten learners in 1 of 3 cohorts were assessed 2 or 4 times during the course of a year. Findings indicated a slight decrease in reading attitudes during the kindergarten year. Expected increases in skills were generally indicated with pronounced increases in sight word recognition during the kindergarten year, after other skills had been mastered. Decreases in some skills were evident after summer recess. Other findings from the study and recommendations for future research and practice are provided.     

武当山近50年考古新发现(续)

近50年的考古调查发掘表明,武当山不仅是我国著名的风景和道教圣地,而且也是我国罕见的一个历史悠久、蕴藏丰富的"文博之乡".从史前的动植物化石、新石器时代的遗址,到有史以来的历代古迹、墓葬和遗存,几乎可以勾画出自生命的起源、人类的诞生以及进入文明时代的一个清晰线索和图景.     

Designating reader perspective to increase comprehension and interest

In three experiments we examined whether reader perspective on a long expository text could be manipulated such that increased text interest and enhancement of two comprehension outcomes would result. In Experiment 1 we verified the viability of a new text for experimental purposes. We then assigned readers a perspective before reading in Experiment 2 and after reading in Experiment 3. One primary research question addressed whether interest in a long expository text could be manipulated by assigning readers a perspective. We considered this to be an examination of purpose-driven interest ( Schraw & Dennison, 1994). As hypothesized, participants rated text segments as more interesting when the segments corresponded to their assigned perspective. In support of our second hypothesis, that recall would increase as a function of reader perspective, low to medium effects were found for both total number and depth of ideas recalled. We discuss implications of this work for understanding of the role of relevance in increasing recall. Implications for practice and future research are also discussed.     

Students’ Research-Informed Socio-scientific Activism: Re/Visions for a Sustainable Future

In many educational contexts throughout the world, increasing focus has been placed on socio-scientific issues; that is, disagreements about potential personal, social and/or environmental problems associated with fields of science and technology. Some suggest (as do we) that many of these potential problems, such as those associated with climate change, are so serious that education needs to be oriented towards encouraging and enabling students to become citizen activists, ready and willing to take personal and social actions to reduce risks associated with the issues. Towards this outcome, teachers we studied encouraged and enabled students to direct open-ended primary (e.g., correlational studies), as well as secondary (e.g., internet searches), research as sources of motivation and direction for their activist projects. In this paper, we concluded, based on constant comparative analyses of qualitative data, that school students’ tendencies towards socio-political activism appeared to depend on myriad, possibly interacting, factors. We focused, though, on curriculum policy statements, school culture, teacher characteristics and student-generated research findings. Our conclusions may be useful to those promoting education for sustainability, generally, and, more specifically, to those encouraging activism on such issues informed by student-led research.