American Educational Research Journal

The issues concerning teachers’ beliefs about and use of retention were explored in a qualitative study. Clinical interviews with teachers, participant observation in kindergarten classes, analysis of documents, and interviews with parents revealed that teachers’ beliefs about the development of school readiness could be described and ordered along a dimension of nativism, that these beliefs relate to their use of retention as a solution to unreadiness or incompetence, and that elements of the organization of the schools in which they teach may also account for beliefs and practices. Teachers’ endorsement of retention diverges both from extant propositional knowledge and from the perceptions of other interested groups.

In this paper, we use the nationally representative “High School and Beyond” (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 1983) data to examine the relationship between a wide range of values that stress the notion of responsibility and high school students’ achievement test scores, grades, discipline problems, and dropout status. We also examine the extent to which students’ behaviors outside of school (e.g., watching television, doing homework, reading, and working for pay) mediate the relationship between values and high school outcomes. Two structural equation models—one using attainment levels as outcomes and one using change scores as outcomes—are analyzed. Results from both models show that when students, their parents, and their peers believe in values and accompanying behaviors that stress responsibility, students have a better chance of achieving success in high school. Values are found to have both direct effects on school outcomes and indirect effects through out-of-school behaviors. The effect of values as a whole is consistently larger than the effect of socioeconomic status (SES) when predicting both level of student performance and changes in student performance.

Precollege schools use their computers predominantly for drill and practice in arithmetic. It has been shown by research to be the most effective application of CAI (Computer-Assisted Instruction). The present study used naturalistic methods to examine differential effectiveness of CAI in arithmetic for high- and low-achieving students. Seven elementary school students with varied backgrounds with regard to socioeconomic status (SES), grade level, type of school, and achievements in arithmetic participated in the study. The study identifies strategies that students use to advance effectively through the levels of the CAI practice with material not yet studied in class. The study also discusses software- and hardware-related errors that students make while working with the CAI system. In many cases, these errors are unrelated to the knowledge of arithmetic. It seems that the low achievers, more than the high achievers, are prone to make these types of errors, which are partly responsible for ineffective CAI work. The study concludes that the higher achieving students observed were much more able than the observed low achievers to adjust to the special environment of computer work and to derive great benefits from it.

This study assessed strategy differences between good and poor readers during reading comprehension assessments employing a text-lookback condition. Sixty good and 60 poor readers read expository passages and responded to free-response items tapping text-explicit information (stated directly in the passage) and text-implicit information (implied but not directly stated in the passage). Subjects were permitted to look back to the passages during question-answering. Responses were analyzed according to the following types of errors: text-based language, reader-based knowledge, and no-response. Several statistically significant effects were noted using both absolute and relative error rates in analyses. Poor readers tended to use strategies related to text-language or would not respond, whereas good readers tended to be more effective overall and to use more reader-based knowledge in responses. Implications are drawn for the characterization of important differences between good and poor readers and for the assessment of reading comprehension processes for different types of readers.

Two types of school-based programs were implemented to facilitate the social integration of normal children and children with severe mental handicaps. The programs were a Special Friends program (Voeltz et al., 1983) and a Peer Tutoring program (Kohl, Moses, & Stettner-Eaton, 1984; Stainback, Stainback, & Hatcher, 1983). The dyadic social interactions that evolved during the course of these programs were compared in three contexts: (a) during the actual program, (b) during a free play session, and (c) during a tutorial session. Reciprocity and complementarity (i.e., the degree to which partners evidenced equal or disparate rates of certain behaviors) between members of each dyad were assessed. Results indicated that interactions occurring during Peer Tutor programs were highly unbalanced, whereas those occurring during Special Friends were balanced for some behaviors and unbalanced for others. Some of these differences were found to generalize to free play probe conditions. Social validation of these differences was obtained through questionnaires completed by teachers, observers, and the nonhandicapped children themselves. Implications for future integration and research are discussed.

This study examined second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade children’s abilities to recall and to answer questions concerning character motives after listening to or reading nine fables that were divided equally, according to the explicitness of the character motive, into three categories: textually explicit, textually implicit, and scriptally implicit. Separate 3×2×3 ANOVAs with repeated measures for each of four dependent measures (recall of character motives, recall of important details, questions concerning character motives, and questions concerning important details) revealed no statistically significant difference for mode of input across dependent measures, a statistically significant difference for grade level (6 > 4 > 2) on questions concerning character motives, and a statistically significant difference among text types (TE > TI or SI). A descriptive analysis of students’ overall performance revealed that elementary grade students had considerable difficulty comprehending character motives in fables, suggesting that character motives may not be central to young children’s understanding of stories. A discussion is offered to explain these results within the context of other research and to make suggestions for further research.