What causes students to leave school? According to Azzam (2007), over 47% of students in the United States who drop out of school reported they did so because school was boring and irrelevant to their life situation. What can schools and teachers do to encourage students to stay in school? One possible solution may be to look at experiential…

This paper discusses a computerized learning environment called TurtleGraph that is designed and developed to support collaborative problem solving. Within the learning environment, learners are requested to write computer programs to generate geometric figures. The instructional focus of the system is to enhance the learner's List Processor…

"Collaboration" appears to be a popular trend in business and education as it is discussed more and more frequently in publications. One of the problems associated with collaboration is the lack of clear definition among similar terms such as cooperation, team effort, and partnerships. This paper briefly reviews the literature related to the…

Schools need effective systems for supporting teachers in meeting students' individual needs and responding to school-wide problems. The Teacher Assistance Team (TAT) model is a school-based problem-solving group that supports teachers by analyzing student, classroom, or school problems and creating alternative strategies for resolving those…

This monograph describes a number of successful solutions that have been used in schools involved in school improvement planning. Problem-solving strategies used by schools across the United States to address various situations are described, in which each school focused on student achievement and teaching learning for all students. The practices,…

Youth with learning disabilities have high rates of unemployment and underemployment. A specific aspect of the poor social skills of adolescents with learning disabilities is their inability to solve unstructured problems on the job. The PROBE module was designed to help youth with learning disabilities to overcome this problem. PROBE is one of…

This booklet presents an overview of Mission 21, a project that promotes technological literacy in the elementary school classroom. Funded since 1985, Mission 21 has enabled graduate research associates and Virginia teachers to write and field test a technology education program for children in grades 1 through 6. Over 30 elementary teachers in 11…

This catalog contains descriptions of the Health and Physical Education programs in the National Diffusion Network. These programs are available to school systems or other educational institutions for implementation in their classrooms. While all of the programs have been validated as effective by the U.S. Department of Education's Program…

This manual describes Version 4 of Soar, an architecture for problem solving and learning based on heuristic search and chunking. Version 4 is available as of January 1986 in Common Lisp, Franz-Lisp, Interlisp, and Zeta-Lisp. An introduction to the Soar system is presented, and information is provided about the following system aspects: (1) data…

Before a course to improve basic reasoning skills can be intelligently designed, it will be necessary to determine the exact nature of those skills. Research indicates that: (1) reasoning skills are highly specific, not generalized; (2) a large number of different reasoning skills exist; (3) many reasoning skills are language dependent and widely…

Using an innovative bargaining model, a Chicago-area (Illinois) school district negotiated a teacher contract in under 30 days in an atmosphere of mutual trust. Central to sociologist Irving Goldaber's "win-win bargaining" model are (1) a schedule and a set of values agreed to by both parties and (2) a neutral facilitator. After adopting…

As a demonstration of the application of heuristic devices to decision-theoretical techniques, an interactive computer program known as MAUD (Multiattribute Utility Decomposition) has been designed to support decision or choice problems that can be decomposed into component factors, or to act as a tool for investigating the microstructure of a…

A community survey conducted in Galveston County, Texas identified four attributes or characteristics of community leadership: problem-solving effectiveness; ability and willingness to accept responsibility; leadership cooperation; and leadership coordination of organizations. The leadership patterns found in Galveston County will effect the…

An alternative general education program for freshmen at Albertus Magnus College is described. The program, an interdisciplinary student-centered introduction to general education, is composed of two parts that the student takes concurrently: (1) a year-long seminar in thought and expression, and (2) a sequence of four (usually 7-week) courses in…

The application of physical principles in solving mathematics problems have often been neglected in the teaching of physics or mathematics, especially at the secondary school level. This paper discusses how to apply the mechanical principles to geometry problems via concrete examples, which aims at providing insight and inspirations to physics or…