This study examined teacher empowerment through the development of individual and collective teacher efficacy. A content-centered staff development program implemented in a Michigan school district by the New Zealand Ministry of Education and Oakland University helped teachers develop efficacy in the teaching of mathematics and in the ability to…

This article examines the antecedents and consequences of residential choice and school transfers within one of the eight largest urban school districts in Texas. This study is based on survey data from a representative sample of parents of K-12 students enrolled in this district. In addition to demographic characteristics of the family, the…

HIV/AIDS programmes in schools ultimately intend to decrease high risk sexual behaviour. One factor facilitating this outcome is a strong health promoting environment in the school. This paper reports a study surveying the health promoting environments supporting HIV/AIDS education in Namibian senior secondary schools. It develops a…

As demand for school reform have grown in Malta in recent years we have noticed increased focus being given to quality issues. As a result the education authorities, due to two main policy initiatives--the introduction of the National Minimum curriculum and school development planning--are encouraging a decentralised form of governance that…

Purpose: Parent satisfaction with their children's school is an important issue in today's competitive educational environment characterized by school choice and government standards; however, few empirical studies address school satisfaction similarities and differences among parents from different ethnic groups. The purpose of this paper is to…

This study investigated the effects of learning communities on the educational development of first-year college students at a large, urban, highly selective, research university. These communities, known as "clusters," comprised a year long sequence of theme-oriented courses that were team taught and that included interdisciplinary lectures and…

The American Legacy Foundation funded 13 state health departments for their Statewide Youth Movement Against Tobacco Use in September 2000. Its goal was to create statewide tobacco control initiatives implemented with youth leadership. The underlying theory behind these initiatives was that tobacco control efforts can best be accomplished by…

The goal of the middle school organization is to create a learning environment that matches the developmental abilities and needs of young adolescents. This research attempts to operationalize that goal by integrating reading and English classes in large urban middle schools. The Student Team Reading and Writing (STRW) program reconfigured…

Although schools contain many material artifacts, studies in classrooms have tended to focus on discourse and quality of social interaction even when artifacts are being used. Responding to Engstrom's (1999) invitation to take artifacts seriously, three studies are described in which a material object was essential to a classroom activity. The…

Throughout the year, students of Contemporary Issues and the Visual Arts class, an interdisciplinary course for high school juniors and seniors at a large Canadian suburban high school, devised and created a number of individual and collective artistic investigations and creative cultural interventions, both within the classroom and the larger…

Recent studies of turnarounds of low-performing schools have focused on the factors that made their successes possible. The author of this article realizes that it would also be valuable to look at what made the schools decline in the first place and the factors that might hinder their transformation. He focuses on some of the aspects of the…

Purpose: Our study identified factors common to a variety of populations and settings that may promote or inhibit uptake and adherence to falls-related interventions. Design and Methods: Semistructured interviews to assess perceived advantages and barriers to taking part in falls-related interventions were carried out in six European countries…

In this article, the authors offer insight into the challenges of helping children with disabilities succeed in music through a collaborative effort of music educators and special educators. Making the curriculum flexible and accommodating a variety of learning styles produces better results and eliminates the need to customize adaptations for…

This research aims to build upon current research in the area of teaching and learning at tertiary level and explore the nature of learning communities in tertiary science and engineering. This study uses a sociocultural approach to address the following question: "What are teachers' and learners' perceptions of the nature of the learning…

This is an abstract for an action research project report on improving student motivation. Students struggle with motivation to perform well in school. This study was designed to increase student motivation in the classroom setting. The targeted population consisted of one third grade classroom, one fourth grade classroom, and three periods of…