Readers searching for a target letter in text are more likely to miss it in frequent function words than in less frequent content words, and the magnitude of this effect increases with age. While this increase has been taken to indicate that proficient readers process familiar words in terms of larger orthographic units, we propose that it reflects the reader's growing ability to extract the st...

Problem solving is not the most important goal in secondary science education. Effective science curriculum incorporates investigation and experiment, inquiry-based learning, and the nature of science to adequately equip the young minds to become independent analytical thinkers. California Content Standards for 8 th grade Physical Science states: " Scientific progress is made by asking meaningf...

This study investigated the effect of different organizations of landmark-location pairings as fine-space information on wayfinding behavior and spatial knowledge on a total of 90 participants: 30 second graders, 30 sixth graders, and 30 adults. All participants had to find their way to a goal in a virtual environment with either randomized or categorical landmarks, or without any landmarks. Th...

BACKGROUND We investigated the prevalence and trends of underweight and overweight/obesity in a population-based sample of Japanese schoolchildren from 2003 to 2012, defined by body mass index (BMI) and percentage overweight (POW). METHODS Subjects comprised fourth and seventh graders from the town of Ina, Japan, from 2003 to 2012. The height and weight of each subject were measured. Children...

With the aim to deepen our understanding of the between-domain relations of academic emotions, a series of three studies was conducted. We theorized that between-domain relations of trait (i.e., habitual) emotions reflected students' judgments of domain similarities, whereas between-domain relations of state (i.e., momentary) emotions did not. This supposition was based on the accessibility mod...

When college students pronounce nonwords, their vowel pronunciations may be affected not only by the consonant that follows the vowel, the coda, but also by the preceding consonant, the onset (Treiman, Kessler, & Bick, 2003). We presented the nonwords used by Treiman et al. to a total of 94 first graders, third graders, fifth graders, and high school students to determine when these context inf...

BACKGROUND Studies on rewording word problems can be grouped into two main groups: situational rewording, in which the situation denoted by the text is described more richly, and conceptual rewording, in which the underlying semantic relations are highlighted. AIMS Our aims are to define and distinguish these two kinds of rewording and to test empirically their relative effectiveness in two d...

In three experiments, we compared the effectiveness of rainbow writing and retrieval practice, two common methods of spelling instruction. In experiment 1 (n=14), second graders completed 2 days of spelling practice, followed by spelling tests 1 day and 5 weeks later. A repeated measures analysis of variance demonstrated that spelling accuracy for words trained with retrieval practice was highe...

INTRODUCTION To identify anthropometric and fitness correlates of elevated blood pressure, serum cholesterol, and glycated hemoglobin, we examined anthropometric and physiologic biomarkers among racial/ethnic minority children aged 11 to 13 years in two urban Los Angeles middle schools. We explored the potential for using obesity or fitness level as screening variables for cardiovascular diseas...

We examined how whole-word lexical information and knowledge of distributional properties of orthography interact in children's spelling. High- versus low-frequency words, which included inconsistently spelled segments occurring more or less frequently in the orthography, were used in two experiments: (a) word spelling; (b) lexical priming of pseudoword spelling. Participants were 1st-, 2nd-, a...