As part of a high-risk youth grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, a survey was developed and implemented to assess knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of seventh-grade students toward alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs (ATODs). In addition to assessing project outcomes, this activity…

Research indicates that exemplary teachers share various characteristics, including a desire for continuous renewal. This book reports on a study to investigate exemplary teachers' personal and professional renewal throughout their career and selected factors that have enabled and/or constrained their renewal. The study involved six participants;…

A study explored the experiences of four adult students who served on the board of The Learning Center, a community-based literacy program. The adult education literature touched on the challenges, benefits, and limitations of participatory practices, but the three were seldom juxtaposed, raising the question of whether the limitations equaled or…

A constructivist framework can often appear vague and abstract to the novice counselor. The abstract and nebulous realm of meaning-making, which is central to constructivist approaches, can be frustrating for a linear, task-oriented counselor. This digest explains the approaches used in constructivist counseling. The need to use constructivist…

Many students view the relationship between their current existence in school and their future as vague. This report documents the processes and outcomes of school communities that have focused attention on clarifying that relationship by helping students plan their futures and supporting them as they try to achieve their goals. This report is…

This book contains 23 chapters organized into seven sections that center around the following themes: (1) theories and concepts; (2) strategies and methods; (3) target populations; (4) settings; (5) training programs; (6) evaluation and accountability; and (7) future trends. The following papers are included: "Adult Development Theories: Ways to…

Noting that children from stable as well as at-risk environments come to preschool settings with fears they cannot articulate, this book provides early childhood professionals with a framework for understanding the emotional lives of the young children they serve. The book combines a theoretical foundation with a practical basis for making…

This Pilipino resource book, written in English and Chinese, is a companion volume to the Level Two Identity teacher's guide designed for children in grades three and four, and part of Berkeley, California Unified School District Asian American Bilingual Center's effort to foster the total growth of the child. Together the two books form the basis…

Current research suggests that teacher development evolves in stages, and that teacher concerns as professionals are central to teacher development. The concerns theory suggests that teacher growth involves a gradual change from concerns about self, to concerns about the task at hand, to concerns about the connections and implications of self,…

Researchers have found it difficult to measure various forms of indirect aggression, such as exclusion from groups, because such behaviors are difficult to observe in field settings such as school playgrounds. This study examined gender and developmental differences in aggression, investigated across-gender aggression, and looked at teachers'…

Individuals such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. successfully employed nonviolent strategies to attain significant political goals. Despite the implications of these achievements, psychologists rarely have studied predispositions to nonviolent behavior empirically. This study investigated the relationships among nonviolent…

This paper discusses the use of outdoor education activities with adolescent at-risk girls. Many young women in this age group unconsciously adopt stereotypical female roles and perceive their identities in terms of their relationships to males. A women-only group provides space in which girls and young women can search for their identities,…

Developed through a modified DACUM (Developing a Curriculum) process involving business, industry, labor, and community agency representatives in Ohio, this document is a comprehensive and verified employer competency profile for occupational work experience (OWE). The list contains units (with and without subunits), competencies, and competency…

Conventional approaches to teaching and learning perpetrate lies about the nature of knowledge, self-worth, and growth. Working with Foxfire and authentic assessment can offer teachers an opportunity to discover emancipating truths. These approaches demonstrate the value of students' growth in their own competence and in their self-direction. The…

The Listening Partners project examined rural mothers' development of a sense of the power of their own minds and voices and the relationship between this sense of power and mothers' parenting strategies and their children's development. Two cohorts of 60 women from a rural, impoverished region of Vermont participated in the program. Half the…