Explores the notion of imaginative development. Defines imagination through a review of literature of music, religion, and aesthetics. Suggests that imagination precedes creativity and involves perception, intuition, thinking, and feeling. Describes a developmental sequence based on research. Proposes ways to cultivate imagination through music.…

Advocates hail privatization as an effective, cost-efficient tool for school boards in meeting their wide-ranging obligations and diverse responsibilities. Critics see privatization as movement away from a publicly owned and operated institution with broad citizen support to a hollow structure that compromises public education's goals. A sidebar…

Mothers of 23 infants with developmental disabilities were given suggestions for ways to interact in a contingently responsive manner. Compared to a control group, the interaction coaching group mothers increased responsivity and decreased stimulation, and the infants were less fussy and performed better on developmental assessments. (Author/JDD)

The item-response-theory-based (IRT) rule-space model was used to diagnose student knowledge about how exponents behave in multiplication and division in a sample of 431 tenth-grade students. Implications for using feedback from the rule-space model in instruction and assessment are discussed. (SLD)

The conceptualization and measurement of student anger is discussed, and results from a study with 248 elementary school students are presented to demonstrate that specific ways of controlling and expressing anger can differentially affect school results. The predictive power of measures of anger and product terms are considered. (SLD)

Evaluates the student teaching process in Japan through analysis of what student teachers write about critical events and their reflections in the context of everyday teaching experience. Results from 2 questionnaires given to 88 student teachers are provided revealing the most difficult incidents encountered, the incidents which were positive,…

Traditional assessment of student progress focuses on product and emphasizes only the academic aspects of student development. Teachers are often frustrated by the teach-test-report model, since grades cannot truly reflect a student's progress. A Canadian secondary school teacher's experience with grade-2 cooperative learning helped restructure…

Discusses various responses to the author's book "Ways with Words--Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms" (1983). Describes how these reactions have led the author to see things in the work that she had not seen before. Strengths and weaknesses of the book she identifies have implications for the conduct of future ethnographic…

Describes how the authors have facilitated student-led literature discussions in their second- and third-grade classrooms. Outlines the basic organizational structure that fosters response-driven conversations about books. Illustrates the various ways students speak meaningfully with each other about the literature (including inferential…

Considers two CD-Rom narratives as examples of high quality, interactive multimedia texts currently available. Looks at how verbal and visual texts draw the reader into an interactive response and the extent to which multimedia elements shape the reader's experience of the text. Bases findings loosely on fieldwork involving responses of four…

Discusses what five teachers learned when they engaged in a literature discussion group to discuss children's books to develop themselves as writing teachers. Highlights the three layers of talk (emotional responses, exploring the meaning of the book, and exploring the writer's craft) and the role these play in the learning process. (SR)

Describes a theater in Port-of-Spain developed by a recovered drug user and advertising executive to provide a safe and interesting environment for recovering drug users. Discusses the methods used to engage the participants in learning about theater. Offers a chronological recounting of the class and describes participants' reactions to various…

Reviews 31 collections of children's poetry that help students see the world from a fresh perspective. Notes how they were used in a variety of classrooms and how children responded to them. Organizes the books in terms of: making the ordinary extraordinary; looking at relationships in new ways; new views of the world; and a fresh look at animals.…

Presents media literacy research of eighth-grade students to determine the level of recognizing and understanding visual and nonvisual codes that make up motion-picture stories. Study focused on rhetoric of the film medium: trust, confidence and belief in films among children is very high; if this trust coincides with ignorance of media codes,…

Two studies investigated emotional-display-rule knowledge and its associations with family expressiveness and peer competence. Findings indicated that third graders combined expression regulation with prosocial reasoning, norm-maintenance, and self-protective motives more frequently than kindergartners. Negative expressiveness was related…