As the national education policy community prepares for the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), revamping the school improvement approach leveraged by accountability systems has risen to the top of the agenda. There is an emerging consensus that the school improvement process should be systemic, led by states and…

In this paper, the authors review and analyze state policy regarding beginning teacher mentoring with a focus on special education. Mentoring policies guide the selection, assignment, and training of mentors and the process with which novice teachers are matched with veteran mentors. Mentoring is a component of induction; but induction also…

Early Head Start serves newborns through toddlers. It is an offshoot of Head Start, the 44-year-old federal program for low-income children ages 3 through 5. Social scientists studying brain development and emotional growth increasingly identify early education as critical to preparing children for kindergarten. As well, researchers have linked it…

Numerous studies have identified that delays in diagnosis related to the mishandling of abnormal test results are an import contributor to diagnostic errors. Factors contributing to missed results included organizational factors, provider factors and patient-related factors. At the diagnosis error conference continuing medical education conference…

In this study, a variation of the bookmark standard setting procedure for passage-based tests is proposed in which separate ordered item booklets are created for the items associated with each passage. This variation is compared to the traditional bookmark procedure for a fifth-grade reading test. The results showed that the single-passage…

The author examined the effects of professional development (PD) on literacy instruction using 75,689 lessons from 1,945 classrooms in 112 schools participating in the Study of Instructional Improvement. Stratifying over 94 pretreatment covariates, including prior instruction, the results revealed the importance of PD as a lever for changing…

Background: The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a supported employment programme on measures of executive functions for 44 adults with autism, assessed at the beginning and the end of the programme period. The average length of time of the community employment was 30 months. Methods: Based on their predominant work activity…

In this study, the authors examined the demographic characteristics of students entering the new small high schools in New York City and contrasted them with the characteristics of students entering the large high schools that closed. They also determined whether these high school reforms altered how different types of students are distributed…

Many students experience difficulties learning to program. They find learning to program in the object-oriented paradigm particularly challenging. As a result, computing educators have tried a variety of instructional methods to assist beginning programmers. These include developing approaches geared specifically toward novices and experimenting…

Delaware Technical and Community College online courses are not properly focused to ensure instructors are effective in improving student achievement. First time online students are not given the proper tools when navigating online courses at the college. The focus at Delaware Tech should be on improving the format which students use when…

On September 3, 2008, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced Chancellor's Regulation A-832, which established a procedure for preventing and addressing student-to-student bias-based harassment in New York City public schools. Community members and advocates stood with the mayor and chancellor as they announced this…

The reform of South Eastern European country vocational education and training (VET) systems has been underway for more than a decade. Initially major efforts focused on reforming the curricula of the vocational schools and training centres to align them better with the rapidly changing needs of the labour market and society. Later the focus moved…

This paper introduces blended learning as a pedagogical approach, which was explored through the European project InnoEd and the way InnoEd undertook by using the on-line InnoEd VRLE. European educators in the InnoEd project have utilised a range of learning activities to help to improve Innovation Education. A mixture of lectures, visual…

The Center's policy and practice analyses have shone a light on how school improvement efforts deal with the various factors interfering with students having an equal opportunity to succeed at school. Unfortunately, the picture that has emerged is rather bleak. Given the continuing difficulties related to reducing dropout rates and closing the…

Gender bias in textbooks (GBIT) is a low-profile education issue, given the 72,000,000 children who still have no access to schooling, but this article argues that GBIT is: (1) an important, (2) near-universal, (3) remarkably uniform, (4) quite persistent but (5) virtually invisible obstacle on the road to gender equality in education--an obstacle…