Among the greatest frustrations of a teacher of history is the failure of many students, even bright and motivated students, to provide concrete evidence to support their assertions about the past. The problem of evidence is by its nature developmental, and thus not amenable to simple punitive or explanatory approaches. History, as a discipline,…

In the tradition of peer review, the members of a profession form with society an unwritten contract whereby society grants the profession autonomy to govern itself and, in return, the members of the profession agree to meet correlative personal and collegial group duties to society. The members of the profession agree to restrain self-interest to…

This article begins by reviewing the author's work on the social construction and representation of school failure as student disability an on the reconstruction of special education and public education to avoid the need for such representations. In the remaining sections, he identifies several trends in education and society and, by linking…

Many young children fail to learn because they lack the self-regulation to delay gratification and suppress impulses. The authors point out some of the reasons for this failure, expose some popular myths regarding regulation, and suggest ways that schools can promote self-regulation in early childhood classrooms.

School administrators, teachers, parents, and juvenile justice officials have long been concerned about the problem of truancy in schools, especially since truancy has been linked to problem behaviors, including academic failure, school dropout, and delinquency. Thus, the prevention of truancy and programs designed to break the cycle of chronic…

Responsiveness to intervention (RTI) is being proposed as an alternative model for making decisions about the presence or absence of specific learning disability. We argue that many questions about RTI remain unanswered, and that radical changes in the proposed regulations are not warranted at this time. Since many fundamental issues related to…

In this article, the author observes how a combination of interrelated elements are currently changing the face of the civilizing traditions of the U.S. education and forming a new culture of childhood. These include: (1) the standardization of education; (2) the dissolution of traditional spontaneous play; and (3) the growing specter of poverty…

Undergraduate retention is a major concern for universities and first year failure is a significant contributor to the overall statistics for non-progression. This report describes an interview-based investigation of students' perceptions for the reasons underlying their failure in 1st and 2nd semester modules. The most commonly cited reasons were…

Despite often lofty rhetoric in a large number of national and international initiatives and in speeches of national and international politicians and bureaucrats, and despite a long history of awareness and the increased visibility of the generally abysmal situation of the Roma in Europe, there is still no serious reason to hope that the lives of…

The reason modernity has become a core topic in the field of educational anthropology is because it has caused tremendous changes in education, making the content, the form, and even the concepts and substance of education different from what they were before and creating a historical process that people often describe in terms of…

Educators in today's classroom face increasing challenges which include the changing complexities of student needs, the intricacies of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the demands of high stakes standardized state assessments and the continuous and often widely publicized issues associated with budget constraints. With all of these challenges,…

Start Making a Reader Today[R] (SMART[R]) is a volunteer tutoring program widely implemented in Oregon for students in grades K-2 who are at risk of reading failure. The program is designed to be a low-cost, easy-to-implement intervention. Volunteer tutors go into schools where at least 40% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch…

Language-related differences between discrepancy-defined and non-discrepancy-defined poor readers were examined in a three-year longitudinal study that began at school entry. The discrepancy-defined (dyslexic) poor readers (n = 19) were identified in terms of poor reading comprehension and average or above average listening comprehension…

Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are at risk for academic failure. Although studies have evaluated the effects of medication on academic outcomes, the literature on non-medication interventions has not received equal attention. This review examined 41 studies that evaluated the impact of non-medication interventions on…

There is now a renewed emphasis in the UK on short intensive interventions to tackle reading failure. In this paper we report on the effect of a programme based on a view that reading problems are associated with the inability of the learner to deal with speech at the level of individual speech sounds even though they may be fully competent in the…