Drawing in a nature journal connects students to their immediate environment, integrates many disciplines, and encourages various styles of learning. It is not necessary to draw well; nature journaling is about learning observation skills, not drawing skills. Equipment, getting started, and various exercises are described. Fifteen resources are…

One of the most powerful ways middle school students learn about themselves is through writing, and one of the most effective ways for students to learn about themselves is by writing about a place. At Cosgriff, a K-8 Catholic School in Salt Lake City, Utah, teachers have put this idea into practice by participating in the River of Words project.…

The aim of this study was to investigate the factors affecting the implementation of Multiple Intelligences (MI) Theory in K-8 classrooms in Turkey. First, it was made meetings in small groups (3 or 4) with 38 teachers in one of the first MI schools in Turkey during the first semesters. They were 22 elementary teachers from Grades 1 to 5 and 16…

In this study, the authors tried to understand the types of dilemmas that adult leaders of youth programs encounter in their daily work with young people. The dilemmas come from an in-depth longitudinal study of ongoing experiences in twelve high-quality urban and rural programs for high school-aged youth. Transcripts from 125 interviews with the…

This study examined the power of school-aged children's creative thinking and temperament to predict children's coping abilities as observed in the school setting. The study also examined children's typical responses to major and minor stressful life events. A total of 60 children between 9 and 12 years of age completed the verbal and figural…

There is a growing sense of frustration among members of the science education research community that results from the fact that the impact of research in science education on classroom practice has been disappointing. In this theoretical paper, the questions of relevance and accountability in science education research are first reviewed and…

Increased constraints on access to alcohol resulted from the closure of the sole hotels in two "experimental" towns. This afforded a natural experiment to study the effects of the change in availability of alcohol on consumption. Dependent measures were derived from public records of liquor sales by all licensed premises, and from…

Reduced alcohol availability following the closure of the sole hotels in two rural towns afforded a naturalistic experiment to study the effects of alcohol availability and context for drinking on consumption. Measures of consumption derived from interviews, total dollars of liquor sales, and police drink-driving data were compared across two…

How infants and toddlers become skilled social actors has not been examined as often as the peer interactions of older children. This study examined 24, middle-class toddlers (ages 23 to 33 months) in 9 different settings during their free-play time at a university-cooperative nursery school. Researchers analyzed 150 social bids which were either…

Over the past decade educational researchers and curriculum evaluators have dealt with the deviation between a specified educational program and its actual implementation. These differences have been referred to as a critical problem in both the achievement and the evaluation of a program's goals. The research reported here has explored the…

As an extension of a two-year longitudinal study involving various aspects of children's writing, a study examined the function of children's oral language during creative writing sessions in typical classroom settings. Using ethnographic style techniques, researchers conducted 46 writing episode observations of seven fifth graders in the spring…

Increasing consideration is being given in the the United States to moving away from corporal punishment as a discipline alternative. Therefore, it is important to look at the experiences of countries such as Norway that have abolished corporal punishment. In this study, questionnaires regarding classroom management techniques were completed by…

Maternal and infant behaviors of 30 American and 52 Japanese mother/infant dyads from middle-class homes were compared. The major differences in caretaker behavior were (1) the Japanese mothers spent more time with or in the presence of their babies than did the American mothers, and (2) the American mothers were more active in positioning the…

This book documents and explores the range of strategies that a competent group of language users (17 students in a graduate course) employed when responding to a range of reading and writing tasks over a semester's time in a naturalistic instructional setting. The book is divided into the following six chapters: (1) "The Nature of…

This paper represents an initial exploration of researcher-informant relationships which develop when naturalistic researchers spend long periods of time watching and recording the details of classroom activity for which a teacher has basic responsibility. The goals of this paper are to present a discussion of the significance of…