Mindframes--your internal set of beliefs about your role as school leader--determine the high-impact leadership practices you choose to implement. In other words, how you think about the impact of the actions you take has more effect on student achievement than your leadership practices themselves. Building on over twenty-five years of Visible…

Whole-school or whole-class programs designed to promote positive behavior can enhance the likelihood that effective teaching and learning occur for all students. This practice guide is intended to help elementary education educators, as well as school and district administrators and parents, implement and support effective prevention-focused…

Communities across the country are grappling with different approaches to improving their schools. Introducing or expanding charter schools is one of the approaches that states and school districts have considered or implemented. Charter schools serve more than 5 percent of public school students nationwide and make up close to 7 percent of all…

REL Pacific at McREL, 1 of 10 Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs) funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), serves educators in American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia (Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap), Guam, Hawai'i, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic…

This report describes the conceptual background, design, and methodology for a study of management of academic tasks in junior high school. Previous research suggests that tasks students accomplish in classrooms determine what they actually learn, and acquisition of higher cognitive skills related to interpretation and planning is essential for…

Work on the development of the intensive time-series design was initiated because of the dissatisfaction with existing research designs. This dissatisfaction resulted from the paucity of data obtained from designs such as the pre-post and randomized posttest-only designs. All have the common characteristic of yielding data from only one or two…

Based on the premise that the only way to improve student achievement is to help parents, article describes school-sponsored parent-education programs that range from occasional classes and workshops to semester-long sessions and support groups, as well as visits into the home and even maternity wards. (Author/PKP)

In March 1996, the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) proposed to evaluate the Chicago Annenberg Challenge's (CAC) newly funded reform efforts in the Chicago public schools. The evaluation aimed to understand how schools involved in CAC efforts developed as organizations and, in turn, how these developments benefited students. The study…

Reviews research to answer under what conditions, if any, does homework make a difference in student achievement. Provides a brief history of the homework debate. Reviews 84 homework experiments conduced between 1904 and 1984. Concludes that most studies found homework beneficial. (JDH)

Measuring cognitive achievement gains in project evaluation is dealt with. This guide provides those concerned with project evaluation with the basic tools for conducting technically sound, interpretable evaluation studies. Exotic designs are avoided and five basic models which appear feasible to implement in real-world settings are focused on.…

The promise charter schools hold for public school innovation and reform lies in an unprecedented combination of freedom and accountability. Underwritten with public funds but run independently, charter schools are free from a range of state laws and district policies stipulating what and how they teach, where they can spend their money, and who…

The 12 participants of Arizona State University's annual graduate workshop in Indian Education were public school teachers, a superintendent, and a student in social work. Prepared by the participants, these 13 papers relate directly to the American Indian's education: "Education for What?", "San Carlos Apache Indians",…

A 4-year research project involving 342 handicapped and 202 nonhandicapped children (in grades 1 through 6) was conducted to determine the practicality and impact of assigning special educators to support regular classroom teachers (the stratistician-generalist model). Examined were the following variables: teacher ratings of the student; student…

The Guide to U.S. Department of Education Programs and Resources, commonly referred to as the Guide to ED Programs, provides an overview of all Department of Education programs authorized and funded under federal law. It also includes information on competitions administered under these programs as well as on the laboratories, centers, and other…

Research related students' orientation toward college and college majors to their attitudes toward computer-assisted instruction (CAI) and their performance in an organic chemistry course using CAI. Major findings were that: 1) students majoring in applied fields manifested more favorable attitudes toward both organic chemistry and CAI, than did…