Three big-city districts--Chicago, Milwaukee, and New York--have terminated federal grants aimed at promoting performance-based compensation plans and professional development for teachers and principals. Overall, the 2010 Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grants to the three districts would have provided an $88 million payout over five years--nearly 7…

Twenty-four free-response questions were developed to explore introductory college astronomy students' understanding of gravity in a variety of contexts, including in and around Earth, throughout the solar system, and in hypothetical situations. Questions were separated into three questionnaires, each of which was given to a section of…

John Muir Elementary School in San Francisco is like countless other schools in cities across the United States. The student body comprises mostly lower income, African American and Latino students who--despite being just as intelligent as their white and Asian counterparts--traditionally underachieve on many academic measures. Talented,…

Teacher leadership has gained attention in recent years as a plausible means by which educational reform and instructional improvement can be accomplished through ongoing, site-based professional development for teachers. This article reviews and draws conclusions across the research literature on professional development and teacher leadership to…

The University of Southern Queensland's Centre for Further Education and Training, which offers distance teaching and training courses to a wide range of mature students, developed a quality assurance framework to guide its efforts to improve the quality of its distance courses for teachers and trainers with little or no training in educational…

A study summarized the activities of two advisory bodies--the Program Advisory Committees (PACs) and Trade Advisory Boards (TABs)--at Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Science and Technology (SIAST). Minutes from all meetings were collected, reviewed, and analyzed according to the main areas of concern for the advisory committees:…

In 1992, a nationwide poll of active forensics programs concluded with an open ended question of how to increase participation in NDT (National Debate Tournament) debate that yielded four goals. The first goal, re-emphasizing communication skills, arose because NDT has emphasized rapid delivery above all else. NDT needs to be more entertaining to…

This paper argues that parliamentary debate provides a meaningful alternative for programs looking to offer debate components in their mission. The most important assumption in the paper is that comprehensive programs are valuable educational laboratories and require debate activities as part of their comprehensiveness; in fact, the comprehensive…

The Job Training Reform Act Amendments were introduced in the House of Representatives to amend the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) to improve the delivery of services to hard-to-serve youth and adults and for other purposes. This report summarizes this proposed legislation, which was recommended for passage by the Committee on Education and…

This ERIC Digest provides basic information about school-age day care programs. Discussion focuses briefly on options available to families with school-age children, developmental needs of school-age children, characteristics of high quality school-age programs, supportive services for self-care, and ways of improving school-age child care…

Improving the inferior image that marketing education has developed can only be accomplished through the professionalism and dedication of each marketing education teacher and through efforts of marketing officials to upgrade program quality at every level. Eight suggestions are offered to stimulate ideas: (1) get students involved in fund-raising…

Suggests that evaluations of compensatory education programs must take into account the goals of the programs, amount and concentration of funding, obstacles surmounted in their implementation, length of affective and cognitive results, and avoid the cost/benefit approach to human beings. (Author/AM)

Evaluating program outcome provides the verification that planners and policy-makers need to decide a program's future. Evaluating program process leads to the discovery of facts that explain outcomes, make goals specific, and improve delivery of services. (Author)

The Cooperative Extension Service has become the largest adult education and human service program in the United States. It makes use of about 1.5 million adult volunteers who spend an average of more than 100 hours each conducting Extension programs under the guidance of extension personnel. Volunteers play a variety of roles including policy…