Classroom research on adaptive teaching indicates few teachers modify instruction for at-risk students in a manner that benefits them. Responsiveness-To-Intervention, with its tiers of increasingly intensive instruction, represents an alternative approach to adaptive instruction that may prove more workable in today's schools.

Current gifted education clearly has its problems as outlined by Ziegler and Phillipson. The focus on personal traits and the assumption of an autocatalytic development of gifts into extraordinary achievement has not been proved a valid approach for designing effective supportive measures. At least one of the reasons proposed by Ziegler and…

The paper examines how the use of hybrid models--that consist of the interacting continuous and discrete processes--may assist in teaching system thinking. We report an experiment in which undergraduate students were asked to choose between a hybrid and a continuous solution for a number of control problems. A correlation has been found between…

This evaluation of progress in tackling the problems of access, quality, equity and completion of primary and secondary education examines the results of an alliance between the Coffee Growers Committee of Caldas (CGC) and the Department of Caldas, Colombia. The evaluation team employed a retrospective approach to understanding the social,…

This document is a discussion of a systemized approach to education theory and practice, especially as it applies to performance-based teacher education. The author uses as the basis of his discussion the physical sciences and their use of approximation models (an illustration of this use is the historical development of the description of matter…

Examines the extent to which a group of superior elementary and secondary school teachers employed systematic instructional-planning practices. The two approaches were found to be different in several important ways: teachers did not place much emphasis on specifying objectives, creating objectives-based tests, or making other instructional…

Presents a framework for model development that, when used, will help the student (or professor) avoid the major pitfalls associated with modeling. Includes not properly identifying the controlling factors, lack of model validation and developing a model that is incompatible with its end use. (CW)

Describes the use of an instructional model for composition involving five procedures: a rationale, instructional objectives, pre-assessment, learning activities, and evaluation. (MKM)

Man engages in the continuous construction of models to describe his reality. This assumption led to some instructional research at Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, developing and testing a systems model for the classroom. A model building process labeled message storage and retrieval was developed in some detail. Using this retrieval…

Steps to foster improvement in individualized instruction are outlined, and stress is placed on developing teacher competencies and systematic procedures. The steps used to accomplish this include planning in terms of goals; organizing work; establishing the proper classroom environment; employing teaching strategies that are diagnostic,…

The Preservice Reading Education Program (PREP) is a competency-based teacher education program for elementary and early childhood education students. It focuses on the following five major activities: (1) the coordination of an organized program in reading education around identified teacher competencies; (2) the individualization of instruction…