The author teaches a high school program called Commercial Foods which is designed to prepare students for careers in the food service industry. The majority of students are special needs youth who generally will not go on to postsecondary education, so her emphasis is placed on workforce development and life skills. Students have resource…

The introduction, in the United Kingdom, of the Special Education Needs and Disabilities Act (SENDA) published and approved in 2001, has removed the exemptions given to educational institutions by the Disabilities Discrimination Act (DDA) of 1995. This applies to learning web sites and materials that must now undergo "reasonable…

In order to help students to make connections in science and literacy through writing, the authors present them with an open-ended question (OEQ), which is a divergent assessment in the form of a writing prompt (a situation), and directions for writing at the beginning of each major unit. Students complete this assessment by the end of the unit.…

Despite a well established body of international literature describing the effect of test anxiety on student performance in a range of assessments, there has been little work conducted on samples of students from the UK. The purpose of this exploratory study is two-fold. First, to establish the relationship between test anxiety and assessment…

This "Report Card to the Public" is published in accordance with Alaska Statute 14.03.120 for the school year 2011-2012. Under state law, each school district is required to report information about its plans and performance to its community. This report includes a statewide summary of performance results. It reports the status of public…

In 2005, the achievement gap between African-American and Caucasian students doubled in the state of Louisiana. Sixty-three percent of the public schools in an urban school district in southeastern Louisiana received an Academically Unacceptable Status (AUS) rating according to Louisiana accountability standards. In 2006, the Louisiana Board of…

Weick's theory of sensemaking is used to analyze findings from a qualitative study of the implementation of a district-initiated adolescent intervention literacy course in two urban secondary schools. The authors concluded that implementation of the literacy course was hampered because district administrators, building leaders, teachers, and…

What features of the physical environment in video game arcades lead kids to be so engaged? How can analysis of arcade space inform language arts teachers' decisions about designing classroom environments? This article presents an analysis of physical space in video game arcades and participants' positions therein to suggest how language arts…

The effects of relaxation exercises on orthography performance in language arts education of fifth to seventh graders were experimentally tested. Participants were 399 basic secondary school students and their language arts teachers from the Hauptschule, a German type of secondary education covering grades five to nine that leads to a basic…

We conducted generalizability studies to examine the extent to which ratings of language arts performance assignments, administered in a large, diverse, urban district to students in second through ninth grades, result in reliable and precise estimates of true student performance. The results highlight three important points when considering the…

For the last several years, composition scholarship has unfortunately neglected the paragraph. Theories about it, however, have a rich history. Eventually, it involved conflicts between prescriptivists and descriptivists, as well as between members of the latter group and the branch of descriptivism called functionalism. In this article, the…

The use of drama with the children in your classroom can catch the attention of even the most reluctant of students and bring literature to life in a way that other methods cannot. Furthermore, "playing" with plays can teach more than language arts; depending on the texts chosen, drama can teach children such important life lessons as tolerance…

Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC) is a multi-site action-research project, focused on teaching and learning in pre-collegiate mathematics and English language arts courses at 11 California community colleges. In this report, the author discusses the data gathered over the course of the SPECC project and reflects…

Legislative amendments contained in the most recent reauthorization of IDEA and NCLB have mandated that all students, including those with special needs, be taught by an appropriately certified teacher. Specifically, both of these laws require that teachers of special education students in core academic classes must meet state special education…

Describes a method for teaching creative dramatics. (RB)