The Virginia Boucher-OCLC Distinguished ILL Librarian Award is the most prestigious commendation given to practitioners in the field. The following questions about ILL were posed to the two most recent recipients of the Boucher Award: Tom Delaney (2002), Coordinator of Interlibrary Loan Services at Colorado State University and Lynn Wiley (2001),…

Dull classroom environments, poor students' attitudes and inhibited conceptual development led to the creation of an innovative mathematics program, the Class Banking System (CBS), which enables teachers to use constructivist ideas and approaches. To assess the effectiveness of the CBS, the Individualised Classroom Environment Questionnaire…

This article reveals the grounds on which individuals form perceptions of disorder. Integrating ideas about implicit bias and statistical discrimination with a theoretical framework on neighborhood racial stigma, our empirical test brings together personal interviews, census data, police records, and systematic social observations situated within…

Educational reform presents a number of challenges for elders, tribal educational leaders, American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) teachers and administrators, and families across the United States, including the pressing need to address parent or caregiver and community involvement in education. This study was conducted to (a) summarize major…

Sharing information orally is an important skill that public speaking classes teach well. However, the author's students report that they do not often see informative lectures, demonstrations, presentations, or discussions that follow the structures and formats of an informative speech as it is discussed in their textbooks. As a result, the author…

This is a study of a reform effort to improve mathematics achievement in an elementary school through a partnership with a university. The partnership involved collaborating with university faculty to provide and plan research based professional development. The purposes of the study were to determine if the instructional practices of the teachers…

To undertake rigorous research in biology and ecology, students must be able to pose testable hypotheses, design decisive studies, and analyse results using suitable statistics. Yet, few biology students excel in topics involving statistics and most attempt to evade optional courses in research methods. Over the last few years, we have developed…

The purpose of this study was to examine the personal conceptualizations of pre-service music education students by focusing on how they talked about learning to teach music in the context of cultural diversity, and to probe the relationships among these conceptualizations prior to, during, and after an immersion internship experience in a…

This article presents answers to the question: What do powerful educational leaders think about training practitioners for social justice? The data are drawn from interviews with a former governor and leaders from the American Association of School Administration (AASA), National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), National…

Purpose: This report seeks to address the preliminary findings from a large-scale study of the different ways in which the asynchronous discussion forum (ADF) is being used in the online learning environment. Design/methodology/approach: A conceptual approach is taken. Findings: The structural and functional variation of the ADF is depicted within…

This study examines processes that personnel go through to assimilate the cultural norms of their schools. These processes are compared according to the teaching and learning environments of healthy, high achieving school districts and unhealthy, low achieving school districts. Specifically, this paper examines the "basket of crabs" effect, a…

This study investigated elementary grade teachers' personal experience with instructional computing in classroom instruction and depicts the causes of comfort or discomfort among teachers in using computers at elementary grade teaching. The specific study involved ten elementary grade teachers from randomly selected schools in Western New York.…

Early childhood teachers may express positive views about inclusive practices but are the practices implemented in their classrooms? This study examined preservice and inservice teachers' attitudes toward inclusive practices as reflected in the teachers' behaviors. This qualitative study utilized open-ended initial interviews, observations with…

A rapid ethnograhic study of 10 itinerant teachers in two school districts and 21 other professionals working with the itinerants was conducted. Rapid ethnography starts with the same assumptions about culture as conventional ethnography. However, it is not constrained by the assumption of cultural ignorance on the investigator's part. Thus, it…

This paper reports the results of a University of Canberra Library survey of student research knowledge, skills, tools and resources. Students are experiencing difficulties interrogating databases, the internet and library catalogues because of the lack of consistency in terminology and various methods of interrogation. This research was an…