Every day in classrooms, teachers and students think about and with text. Their beliefs about what text is, who created it, and how to evaluate it are an influence, often a profoundly important one, on how they use text. This book brings together research on epistemology, belief systems, teacher beliefs, and text -- research that is usually presented separately, and in different disciplines. The editors illustrate what a cross-disciplinary body of work looks like, what varied insights are possible, and when the central concerns are beliefs and text.
Written by respected researchers in the fields of psychology and education, the chapters are clustered thematically into three sections:
* childrens' and adults' beliefs about text.
* beliefs about what should be taught and how particular content should be taught and assessed in classrooms.
* commentary on knowing versus believing, on the literatures that inform this body of work, and on belief systems.
The first to address this important topic in a single volume, this book provides an essential synthesis of current research in an active area of inquiry. The chapters are pieces framed in a time and place with particular intentions -- one of those intentions is that they separately and as a whole stimulate discussion about beliefs and text.

It is both a pleasure and a privilege to be invited to contribute a foreword to this book, which deserves - and needs - to be read by virtually everyone who is concerned with the treatment and subse quent welfare of the victims of severe injuries of the brain. Some friends, relatives and workmates might be helped by reading some parts of it, but, if the book has the effect it deserves to have on therapists, nurses, doctors, and others working in both hospitals and the community, these laymen will be suitably informed and assisted by one or more members of the necessarily large therapeutic team. The improvements in methods of resuscitation that have taken place during the last 40 years or so have abolished the previously fatalistic readiness to accept that a week or two in coma after a head injury was virtually a sentence to death from pneumonia. After it had become possible to save lives it gradually became clear that survival of the patient was not necessarily followed by recovery of the brain and that the price of success, in saving lives, was a popula tion of cerebral cripples that was increasing at the rate of 1000 or more a year throughout the country. Although this figure has remained about the same for more than 20 years, there has been a great improvement in the amount of interest, the standard of care and the quality of results that are being achieved."

Have you ever lost a child, grandchild, niece, or nephew, or know someone who is dealing with the loss of a child? If so, Gone Fishing will take you on a wonderful journey. Jonathan's short life here on Earth touched the lives of those around him, especially his parents. From Heaven, Jonathan comforts his parents as they grieve over his untimely death. He follows them through the funeral, holidays, birthdays, and days in-between where every day life on Earth seems hard.

There is an unsettledness now in after-school childcare. The stay-at-home mom years are largely over. Will children, even very young children, stay home alone or hang out with peers, risking loneliness or engaging in problem behavior? Will some new form of supervised care emerge? The authors in this collection have spent time in community after-school programs and have learned what happens there.

The authors suggest that after-school programs can be an important part of a system of childcare--as long as we can find ways to build programs for small and scattered populations as well as for densely packed ones, and as long as the money to fund programs can be found. The money is important. Many of the programs discussed in this book are specifically targeted to children from families with low incomes. These are the families least likely to be able to pay for care. A reader leaves this book with both anxiety and hope about the future of childcare in the United States.

Developmental psychologists have been interested in metacognitive phenomena since the early 1970s, while reading researchers have been interested in awareness, monitoring, and strategy use for text-processing as part of a shift in focus from text factors to reader factors in reading. A great many research studies have been conducted by psychologists and reading researchers under the rubric of metacognition. Unlike other chapters fom some edited books which present only syntheses of this burgeoning research literature, this volume not only presents the literature but provides analysis about its usefulness for researchers and practitioners. It also presents a discussion of important methodological dilemmas within these research literatures.

Every day in classrooms, teachers and students think about and with text. Their beliefs about what text is, who created it, and how to evaluate it are an influence, often a profoundly important one, on how they use text. This book brings together research on epistemology, belief systems, teacher beliefs, and text -- research that is usually presented separately, and in different disciplines. The editors illustrate what a cross-disciplinary body of work looks like, what varied insights are possible, and when the central concerns are beliefs and text.
Written by respected researchers in the fields of psychology and education, the chapters are clustered thematically into three sections:
* childrens' and adults' beliefs about text.
* beliefs about what should be taught and how particular content should be taught and assessed in classrooms.
* commentary on knowing versus believing, on the literatures that inform this body of work, and on belief systems.
The first to address this important topic in a single volume, this book provides an essential synthesis of current research in an active area of inquiry. The chapters are pieces framed in a time and place with particular intentions -- one of those intentions is that they separately and as a whole stimulate discussion about beliefs and text.