The challenges of early adolescence are intensified for girls of color who live in disadvantaged urban communities. One response to the needs of these girls comes from the Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA), a youth development organization that has a long-standing presence in innercity neighborhoods. A gender equity initiative designed to…

Examined the role of awareness in relation to R. W. Schmidt's noticing hypothesis in second language acquisition. The study analyzed the think-aloud protocols of adult learners of Spanish as a second language as they were completing a problem-solving task as well as their immediate performances on two post-exposure assessment tasks, a recognition…

Explored relationship between family resources and social competence of 300 adolescents. Found that parental education, occupation, and family income were related to positive peer and teacher-related social competence among advantaged adolescents. Negative responses and outside family support were positively related to disadvantaged adolescents'…

A study investigated the standards used in refereeing scholarly journal articles to judge qualitative research methods. Examination of reviewers' critiques of 57 manuscripts submitted to the "Review of Higher Education" revealed 7 themes that reviewers focused on, and also found reviewers emphasized good writing and clear articulation of…

Analyzes some of the mistakes made and the lessons learned doing participant-observation research on six special congressional elections. Briefly describes seven of these lessons including schedule strategically, get multiple perspectives, do not overlook details, be a pack rat, and recognizing that some goals and processes are antithetical. (MJP)

Presents an application of a model of user evaluation of four major Web search engines (Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, and Lycos) by undergraduates. Evaluation was based on 16 performance measures representing five evaluation criteria-relevance, efficiency, utility, user satisfaction, and connectivity. Content analysis of verbal data identified a…

Twelve older Aboriginal women in a Canadian city were trained to be co-researchers as part of a participatory health assessment and health promotion project involving 40 such women. Lessons were learned about project ownership, Native perceptions of research, use of traditions, participants' capacity to engage in research and analysis, conflict…

Investigates job satisfaction of Chilean secondary school teachers. Determines that teachers were most satisfied with interactions with students, relationships within the school, and opportunities to contribute to the development of individuals, future generations, and society. Shows that the main dissatisfactions are poor salary, excessive…

Explores what second-grade students learned about reading, writing, and literature through a year-long program of strategy instruction integrated within a literature-based environment. Reveals that students grew in overall instructional reading level, coming to view reading as a natural component of the school day; developed skill in word…

Analyzes the proposal-writing environment, the characteristics of proposals, and the practices of seven engineers at a Silicon Valley engineering firm that does government defense work. Finds that engineers write proposals collaboratively and have a highly structured composing process. Describes how the firm's Proposal Writing Center dramatically…

Describes a microcomputer-based software package developed at the University of Surrey for teaching digital signal processing to undergraduate science and engineering students. Menu-driven software capabilities are explained, including demonstration of qualitative concepts and experimentation with quantitative data, and examples are given of…

Examines the tensions created between public demands for curriculum changes and the schools' internal needs. Reports a case study on the implementation of a core curriculum in an English comprehensive school. Focuses on the work of the curriculum committee and the role of the principal. Assesses successes and failures of the project. (RW)

A qualitative study of learners' strategies in selecting resources within an information-rich learning environment was conducted to develop a grounded theory of student choice. Coding categories were developed that suggested common learning events; cognitive learning patterns were searched; and a factor analysis uncovered eight factors that…

This article describes a qualitative study of the impact that Internet electronic-mail-distributed conferences, or e-conferences, have begun to have on the information seeking and sharing behavior of library and information science professionals and scholars. Highlights include a literature review; enhancing or replacing information sources; and…

This study examined transformations in educational discourse in the context of history lessons at a Hungarian secondary school with an English immersion program. It provides a contextualized analysis of classroom discourse practices by examining some of the sociocultural, linguistic, and academic knowledge structures that are integral to and…