A new report published by the Manhattan Institute for Education Policy, "The Effect of Special Education Vouchers on Public School Achievement: Evidence from Florida's McKay Scholarship Program," attempts to examine the complex issue of how competition introduced through school vouchers affects student outcomes in public schools. The…

Research (Goodman, Fulbright, & Zimmerman, 1997; IEL, 2001) supports that the most critical decision a school board has to make is its selection and appointment of a superintendent to lead the district toward its mission of effective schooling for all students. Given that board members hold influential power in this regard, what competencies…

The purpose of this study was to examine self-determination and achievement motivation as predictors of successful school performance for high school African American males enrolled in an urban Texas school district. The students (N = 108) were placed into two distinct groups: higher-performing and lower-performing African American males based…

The present study sought to examine the relationship between teacher quality and student achievement in public elementary schools in a community district school of the New York City. It has 23 elementary schools, more than 7,600 students and around 350 teachers. For this study, participants consist of a sample of 117 full-time teachers who were…

The Working Together (WT) project involved the design and delivery of an online learning resource for healthcare teams in long-term care (LTC) so that knowledge regarding interprofessional collaborative patient-centred practice (ICPCP) could be readily accessed and then transferred to the workplace. The purpose of this paper is to better…

Bridging the areas of political-economic sociology, the sociology of agriculture and environmental sociology, this study tests two hypotheses derived from a refined theory of foreign investment dependence. The hypotheses state that pesticide and fertilizer use intensity in less-developed countries are both positively associated with foreign…

The paper outlines a new paradigm and its underlying rationales for implementing networked learning environments that is emerging from new technologies such as multi-user platform, virtual worlds, virtual learning community, and intelligent agents. The proposed paradigm of the networked learning environments is described as inhabited virtual…

The United States Census Bureau characterized the position of school superintendent as being the most male-dominated executive position of any profession in the United States (Glass, Bjork, & Brunner, 2001). Paul Houston, president of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) has stated that the future of school system…

Professional development that increases quality classroom instruction is a concern of school administrators and professional educators. Using survey, observation, and interview methods, four rural schools in the Upper Cumberland area of Tennessee were examined to determine if professional development supported by the Reading Excellence Act…

This study set out to empirically determine the reliability and validity of the Vocabulary Levels Tests, both the passive and productive versions. Furthermore, attempt was made to investigate the nature of the students' vocabulary knowledge with regard to their passive and active knowledge of the L2 words as a whole and at different word frequency…

"In an age when browsing the net, playing with funky handsets and passing non-stop SMSs seem to be the order of the day, reading a book in a peaceful corner of a library has become an archaic idea for most people. While technology is slowly taking a steady control over individual lives, the reading habit is fast vanishing into thin…

This action-research paper focuses on the eorts of faculty to introduce a standards-based electronic portfolio (e-folio) requirement to aspiring educational administrators at a private university in New York over a 24 month period. The e-folio initiative was established for multiple reasons, including illustration of students' progress throughout…

When 2006 Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) scores were released in March 2007, there were many questions about the comparability of the 2006 test to earlier ISATs. The 2006 ISAT was a new test, with new items, a new format, new timing requirements, and new scoring procedures. Many people were skeptical about whether it was appropriate to…

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of Science-Technology-Society (STS) curriculum on students' scientific literacy, problem solving and decision making. Four hundred and eighty (480) Senior Secondary two science and non-science students were randomly selected from intact classes in six secondary schools in Calabar Municipality of…

Research in goal theory has often relied on the general linear model, ignoring some central assumptions of the theoretical framework under investigation. The purpose of the two studies reported here was to illustrate how the Rasch model can supplement traditional statistical analyses when evaluating the effects of goal orientations on persistence.…