The Incredible Years® (IY) program series is a set of interlocking and comprehensive training programs for parents, teachers, and children. This article briefly reviews the theoretical foundations, goals, and research underlying these programs. The main purpose of the paper is to describe how the IY programs have been scaled up slowly and…

Educational leadership practice is embedded and shaped in its own context. However, contemporary policy makers are keen to use research findings from multiple educational systems to produce overall, generic models of best leadership practice. Therefore, research needs to encompass analyses of the political, societal, cultural, and institutional…

Interest in setting high educational standards is at the forefront of many school reform programs in the United States. States' pursuit of high standards can be advanced through implementation of programs such as High Schools That Work ("HSTW"), which emphasizes high expectations and rigorous academics for all students, including Career…

The authors conducted a third-party study of the student achievement effects of Struggling Schools, a user-generated approach to Comprehensive School Reform (CSR). The design was a quasiexperimental, pre-post matched sample (N = 180) with school as unit of analysis, drawing on 3 years of achievement data from standardized external assessments.…

Drawing on experiences across Fourth World contexts, with an emphasis on the Alaska context, this article seeks to extend our understandings of the learning processes within and at the intersection of diverse worldviews and knowledge systems. We outline the rationale for a comprehensive program of educational initiatives closely articulated with…

The LIGRU project is concerned with the objectives, methods, and evaluation of literature instruction in the Swedish comprehensive school. This document presents a taxonomy of educational objectives and evaluation instruments. The resulting scheme, derived from a review of other classification schema, has two dimensions -- goal area and aspect.…

Author talks to Torsten Husen, one of the architects of Sweden's comprehensive system, about his current ideas on reforming schools. (Editor/RK)

Reviews educational changes in Sweden since the 1962 Education Act, which expanded educational opportunities through introduction of comprehensive schools. Discusses the effects of Swedish reforms on educational policy debates in Great Britain and West Germany and on comparative education research in Europe and the United States. Contains 32…

This dissertation examines the basis for adoption and development of elective English programs in the school district of Philadelphia's 21 comprehensive senior high schools. Personal, structured, executive interviews conducted in the work setting with English department heads were the source of data for the study. It was hypothesized that elective…

Many educators believe that comprehensive school reform (CSR) holds real promise for improving schools, as many CSR programs are based in research and have documented success. However, in the past year, there has been increased emphasis on CSR programs' evidence of effectiveness and scrutiny of CSR evaluations' degree of rigor. Questions exist…

American-style comprehensive high school (CHS) systems were started in Japan and Taiwan in 1994 and 1996, respectively. Most CHSs in Taiwan were transformed from senior vocational schools, whereas others were changed from senior high schools or newly founded. To assist these schools in successfully restructuring or designing new programs, a…

Research results are collated and presented concerning the change in Finland from a binary system of education to a more unitary system, the "comprehensive school," involving a single primary school (grades one through nine) and a choice between vocational and senior secondary school (grades ten through twelve). The new system, being…

Based on the premise that a well articulated island-wide program of vocational-technical education at the post secondary level can provide much of the impetus for socio-economic progress in Puerto Rico, this study is devoted to elaborating the master plan for an educational system consisting of 2-year comprehensive community colleges. Following an…

This report discusses the results of a five-year effort to develop a comprehensive planning process that would enable school districts to initiate and maintain a self-sustaining planning capability. In addition to examining the general principles and procedures of the comprehensive planning approach to school district planning, the author…