This volume offers nine chapters on focal issues in current urban education that are of a middle-range of abstraction and have long-term consequences for students. Individual chapters provide examples of possible interventions appropriate to the unique context of urban schools. The following chapters correspond to nine problems of practice, which…

This guide to leadership for college department chairs addresses three major challenges: (1) developing understanding and clarity about the motives and role of a department chair; (2) understanding the strategic planning process for creating a productive department; and (3) developing key leadership skills required for effectiveness. The first…

This paper discusses the use of World Wide Web-based conferencing in the Collaborative Teacher Education Program (CTEP) at Indiana University. The CTEP, a program offering distance education coursework to in-service teachers in rural communities throughout southern Indiana, is described, and some of the obstacles and limitations involved in…

This paper presents a study of factors influencing students' perceived learning in a World Wide Web-based course environment. Qualitative and quantitative methods were employed in the process of data collection and analysis. Results indicated that percent of grade weight on discussion and instructor's specification of requirements of students'…

This teacher's guide offers classroom techniques for teaching science to bilingual elementary students. Recommendations are made for improving teaching by: lowering students' affective filters; providing comprehensible input; providing for language output; creating a supportive environment; adjusting classroom teaching style; teaching…

A study was done to examine the effort put into their undergraduate study by University of California Davis students and their estimates of what they think they have gotten out of their study. The study used data collected from a stratified random sample of 300 Black students, 300 Chicanos, and 886 other students all of whom received a survey in…

As part of Saddleback College's (SC's) accreditation process, the Community College Student Experiences Questionnaire was administered to 1,250 students during the second week of classes in fall 1991. The survey focused on the following areas: college environment; institutional effectiveness; estimated gain on a variety of personal/developmental…

Today, nearly 1 billion adults are totally illiterate; the large majority are women. Varying and vague definitions of literacy abound in the literature and in practice. Literacy is only a potential tool that can be used for a variety of economic, social, political, and cultural purposes. Three principal state objectives for launching literacy…

The mission of the National Council on Vocational Education (NCVE), a presidential advisory council consisting of representatives of business, industry, and education, is to ensure the development of a first-class American work force. As part of this mission, the NCVE held a series of meetings with representatives of various industries to solicit…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) focuses on providing information on what demographic subgroups of America's students know and can do. Because the NAEP does not report for individual students, it could be classified by some students as a low-risk test. Consequently, some students may lack proper motivation for giving their…

This study is an exploratory analysis of class-level data concerning junior high school (JHS) students' affective and motivational beliefs. It examines class-level information on selected psychological characteristics that students, who read at the fifth-grade level, bring to learning mathematics and that teachers encounter during instruction.…

Studies of school effectiveness have sometimes been criticized for placing too great an emphasis on a limited range of achievement measures as indicators of school quality. This paper draws on a study of secondary schools in Australia to explore the extent to which achievement growth, attitudes toward school, and school holding power are…

The Cognitive Education Project centered at the University of Alberta undertook a 3-year longitudinal evaluation of two cognitive education programs aimed at teaching thinking skills. The critical difference between the two experimental programs was that one, Feuerstein's Instrumental Enrichment (IE) method was taught out of curricular content,…

This ethnographic account describes how poverty circumscribes the horizons of young people and how the class structure is reproduced at the societal level. A number of social theories that have considered the problems of social reproduction are explored before moving to the examination of the lives of young men in Clarendon Heights, a low-income…

It has been suggested that in science education the immediacy and pervasiveness of television and its ability to bring the world into the classroom could be effectively used by the teacher. The motivational uses of instructional television in a high school environmental science class were studied with 57 tenth graders at a suburban high school.…