Developmental education courses have become a standard in community colleges in the United States. An overwhelming majority of these public two-year schools offer developmental courses to a wide array of students. At the same time, developmental programs are under a constant barrage of attacks from a variety of stakeholder organizations that view…

It was of interest to determine if earlier research findings, where female students were particularly advantaged by the Team Building Through Physical Challenges (TBPC; Glover & Midura, 1992) program in a coeducational setting, would still be observed in gender-segregated physical education classes. A total of 260 female (n = 127) and male (n…

Background: The diagnostic validity of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) based on Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has been challenged in Down syndrome (DS), because of the high prevalence of cognitive impairments in this population. Therefore, we attempted to validate DSM-based diagnoses via an unbiased categorisation of…

Thirty-seven students from a suburban community in the southern United States were randomly assigned to receive 30 minutes of additional instruction each day in their usual language arts curriculum or 30 minutes of instruction with the Direct Instruction program, "Funnix Beginning Reading". Instruction for the "Funnix" group…

Surveys were administered to adolescents (N = 144) to determine if young people varied based on the type of long-term aims they held. Using cluster analysis, four groups emerged from the data: youth without clear long-term aims, youth with self-oriented long-term aims, youth with other-oriented long-term aims, and youth with both self- and…

The purpose of this study was to determine which of two educational interventions delivered in Spanish would influence Latino elders' attitudes toward and comfort with end-of-life planning in comparison with a control group receiving only standard information routinely provided. Using a posttest-only control group design, elders receiving home…

Taking Action Opportunities (TAO) is a curriculum that combines guided reflection, a focus on the local environment, and innovative use of wildlife technology to empower student action toward improving the environment. TAO is experientially based and uses remote cameras as a tool for schoolyard exploration. Through TAO, students engage in research…

Purpose: The purpose of this dissertation was to determine the extent to which school instructional calendar configuration (i.e., year-round or traditional) influenced Grade 5 student academic performance as reflected on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test as a function of student ethnicity (i.e., Hispanic, White, and Black)…

From 2000 to 2011, the number of children out of school worldwide has decreased from 102 million to 57 million--a reduction of almost 50 percent (Millennium Development Goals Report, 2013). However, many children in developing countries do not complete primary or secondary cycles once they enroll; out of the 137 million children who entered first…

This article suggests that contact with the legal system increased school dropout in a Chicago sample of 4,844 inner-city students. According to multilevel multivariate logistic models, students who were first arrested during the 9th or 10th grade were six to eight times more likely than were nonarrested students ever to dropout of high school and…

This article reports findings from a study of the motivations of college students to choose or not choose a career as a K-12 teacher. Five hundred-seventeen college students majoring in education and non-education programs enrolled in undergraduate courses were surveyed as to their motivations for choosing/not choosing a career in K-12. If they…

The purpose of this study was to explore the learning strategies used by ethnically diverse learners and to investigate the relationships among the constructs of classroom goal structure, achievement goal orientation, motivation and self-regulated learning in an ethnically diverse population of fourth and fifth grade learners (n = 396). Goal…

This study aimed to investigate the relationships between college students' behavioral and cognitive engagements while performing an online collective information searching (CIS) activity. The activity aimed to assist the students in utilizing a social bookmarking application to exploit the Internet in a collective manner. A group of 101 college…

Educational, social, and learning development theories for inclusion, grounded in Bandura's social cognitive theory, do not explicitly take into account individuals with Down syndrome, one of the most common birth defects. The problem addressed in this study was the lack of data regarding teacher attitudes toward inclusion of students with Down…

This study examined the heterogeneity of bullying among adolescents. It was hypothesized that bullying behavior serves different social functions and, depending on these functions, bullies will differ in their skills, status and social behavior. In a total sample of 806 8th graders, 120 adolescents (52 boys, 68 girls) were identified as bullies…