The Middle School Task Force was created in May 2007 as a result of the State Board of Education's High School Redesign efforts and recommendation for a committee to examine middle school issues to meet the following goals: (1) To ensure that all students are prepared to be successful in high school; (2) To increase academic engagement and student…

The purpose of this thesis was to create a lesson design to train parent/educators in the art of preparing lessons incorporating biblical reasoning throughout all subjects. It is an introductory seminar and not intended to provide complete training in this area. A sample group of parent educators were made available to pilot the program. Among…

The purpose of this study was to examine the current status of undergraduate string teacher education curriculum in Turkish universities in both eastern and western regions. To accomplish this task, the relative strengths and weaknesses of Turkish string teacher education were investigated through an intensive literature review and a survey.…

"Physical Education--a portrait of current practice" is one in a series of portraits by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education (HMIE), depicting current practice in key aspects of the Scottish curriculum. The portrait series is a recent initiative by HMIE, flowing from the "Improving Scottish Education" (ISE) report. It is…

"Geography--a portrait of current practice" in Scottish secondary schools is one of a developing series of publications by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education (HMIE), designed to reflect current good practice in subjects and aspects of Scottish education and identify areas for further improvement. The portrait series is a new…

Plant growth, development and reproduction are fundamental concepts in biology; yet there is a recorded lack of motivation for young people to grapple with these concepts. Here we present the "DigitalSeed" toy for making investigations around these concepts more accessible to children through hands-on digital interaction. This is part of an…

Early childhood music education in Israel is important for policymakers and practitioners. Various programs, official and nonofficial, coexist in chaotic and unrelated ways. Recently, the Ministry of Education published a music curriculum for children ages three to six, which dictates the musical repertoire-mainly Western art music and Hebrew…

The author's charge in this article is to focus particularly on the question of how an academic community can sustain itself and work productively and positively to achieve normally high aspirations for its students and all members of the community. Writing from the perspective of a longtime member of the Virginia Tech community, he begins with a…

Traditional courses for graduate students in the biological sciences typically span a semester, are organized around the fundamental concepts of a single discipline, and are aimed at the needs of incoming students. Such courses demand significant time commitment from both faculty and course participants; thus, they are avoided by a subset of the…

It is a challenge for schools with large populations of students from low-income, migrant, and international families to ensure that every student reaches proficiency on challenging state academic achievement standards and state academic assessments. Traditionally, schools across the country have tended to cope with this challenge by offering a…

Just as trends in medical education are changing continuously, so must curricula. To keep pace with such trends the School of Medicine Tec de Monterrey, Mexico, underwent a curriculum reform process with the goal of developing a new educational model and reducing resistance to change. The Curriculum Committee created seven subcommittees involving…

This article explores the views and actions of four science teachers participating in a collaborative action research project. A qualitative case study approach was used to describe and analyze the development of these teachers. This development initially involved the teachers critically comparing their extant practices to current developments in…

Poor math performance is a major concern leading the current educational reform agenda. Many educational math critics are claiming a math crisis. Researchers and school personnel are trying to resolve this crisis. Some are looking at curriculum-based evaluation (CBE) as a process for solving this problem. CBE and curriculum-based measurement (CBM)…

From the early 1990s onwards, various European Union (EU) reports have commented on the low level of European exports and foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Asian region, and the invisibility of Europe in the Asian imagination in comparison with the United States. To overcome this problem, a series of policy and programme initiatives have been…

Virginia Commonwealth University developed an enhanced medical student geriattic curriculum that includes required home visits and nursing home visits for second year students (180 per year), an annual Forum on Aging for all first and second year students, and small group exercises. We added 30 hours of basic science material to pre-clinical…