Gender differences in participation and performance at "high stakes" examinations have received much public attention, which has often focused on mathematics and science subjects. This paper describes the innovative forms of assessment introduced into mathematics and science subjects within the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE)…

Background: This study examines the contribution of the marital relationship to the well-being of both mothers and fathers of children with developmental disabilities. Parent well-being is conceptualized in terms of mental health, parenting stress and parenting efficacy. Methods: These analyses are based on data from 67 families participating in…

This article reports on a study that is concerned with surveying the aspirations of some students in an Australian Technical and Further Education (TAFE) College and developing strategies to address issues arising from the surveys. The study is essentially a series of surveys, thought it has an action learning aspect because of its developmental…

The failure to consider factors that make a key contribution to violence and its prevention may create serious problems of construct validity for school violence surveys. Further, few studies have assessed the relative importance of variables contributing to perceptions of safety by examining correlations between survey items and overall feelings…

Any discussions about specialized helping environments for children or young people would be incomplete without reference to the relationships found between practices in group care centers and schools. This involves thinking of a child's total environment as a curriculum for teaching competencies and learning outcomes important to daily living.…

This article provides a conflict analysis of colonial schooling in Fiji, tracing how imported schooling was incorporated into indigenous structures of status differentiation. It begins with a discussion of the chieftaincy system as the socio-political institution in place in this South Pacific archipelago when European explorers and missionaries…

Effective intervention for early language delay in minority and poor children is difficult to provide because we know so little about its prevention, assessment, and treatment. This article provides an overview of an "integrative model of minority child development" that considers the influence of social factors such as race and class to explore…

Standardized rating scales are the most often used part of the multidimensional assessment of children's behavior. However, low cross-informant correlations raise concerns about the reliability and validity of the resulting scores. This study examined whether the manner in which behavioral constructs are measured differs across informants, across…

This study examines how rural elementary school administrators perceive the effects of high-stakes testing in comparison to suburban and urban elementary administrators. High-stakes testing had a greater impact, both positively and negatively, on rural administrators than on their counterparts in suburban and urban schools. Specifically, the…

This report describes an investigation into how a school moves from a handful of individual teachers dabbling in alternative assessment strategies to full school implementation of an assessment system. The research was conducted at Bay Park Elementary School in the San Diego (California) City School District, a school participating in a pilot…

This curriculum guide was prepared as a tool for teaching students the purpose and function of the ACCESS PENNSYLVANIA database in the total concept of information literacy. The database on compact laser disc contains information about the holdings of hundreds of school, public, academic, and special use libraries. The database can be searched at…

This paper reports on research in student self-evaluation processes. Student self-evaluation requires judgment of the "worth" of one s performance and the identification of strengths and weaknesses with a view to improving learning outcomes. Research was conducted at three sites: an Australian country secondary school; a suburban London…

This curriculum is an extensive revision and expansion of a previous competency-based survival English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) curriculum designed to bring ESL learners to a level of proficiency that would enable them to adapt to most everyday situations, even if not specifically trained for each situation. This curriculum maintains a…

Recognizing the perceived conflict between a belief in the value of play to early childhood development and a commitment to an early childhood pedagogical framework, this book attempts to validate play as a fundamental component of learning and an avenue through which learning outcomes can be identified and confirmed. The book is designed to…

The objectives of this study were identification and verification of key processes that could be used by higher education quality administrators to implement continuous improvement programs and benchmarking processes. East Tennessee State University's Continuous Improvement Key Process Relationship Matrix was used as the basis of a 44-item…