College-bound high school seniors and their parents too often choose their undergraduate institutions not on the basis of teaching caliber, but on the strength of the perceived academic credential. Faculty understand that in higher education, value and prestige attach first to research, second to teaching graduate and advanced professional…

The Minnesota Department of Education's Office of Community and Adult Basic Education commissioned an evaluation the 18 adult refugee English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) programs funded in 1985-86 through the Minnesota Refugee Program Office of the Department of Human Services. The purpose of the evaluation was to identify effective practices and…

This study examines variables that affect staff development in rural schools. It examines systematically delivered rural staff development intervention in 28 rural schools in five states representative of the Southwest--Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. The study, involving 700 teachers, tests 18 hypotheses based largely on…

The design and testing of an approach to reading instruction are described. The design system consists of five stages: analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. A needs analysis indicated the necessity to improve the reading skills of limited-English-proficient students. A group of 6- to 8-year-old students were identified for…

The role influx of underprepared students has challenged community colleges to develop effective ways to improve teaching and learning strategies in the classroom. In 1990, a study was conducted by the Mississippi State University Educational Media Center to compare the effects of traditional versus Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) on the…

This paper addresses the following questions: (1) What skills are needed in the U.S. economy? (2) What are citizens getting from U.S. schools? and (3) How does the United States get what is needed? The paper is divided into three sections. The first section, "The Transformation of the American Economy," examines the following data…

In a response to lower test scores in science and mathematics in Australia, the Western Australian Institute of Technology conducted a study to identify high quality science and mathematics teachers in Western Australian schools. This paper describes the teaching practices of one male and one female teacher of biology from two different schools.…

Given that the task of freshman composition is to initiate students into the multidisciplinary academic discourse community, English teachers can speed up the novice's introduction more effectively than can specialists in those disciplines by having students observe, analyze, and produce the salient features of a discourse community's…

An emerging focus of elementary and secondary mathematics instruction is on problem solving. This study examined an instructional approach for teaching children with learning disabilities how to solve arithmetic word problems. The study was conducted with 60 fifth and sixth grade students who had previously been identified as learning disabled.…

In 1980, Wichita State University received a grant to introduce microcomputers as interactive teaching tools in large science classrooms. Through this grant, 18 faculty in 11 departments developed software modules illustrating concepts that are often difficult to teach by usual lecture methods. To determine whether the use of microcomputers in…

The use of microcomputers in language arts instruction with exceptional students can be an effective tool for both teaching and reinforcing skills, but is not typically employed as an integral part of the overall language arts curriculum. Research studies substantiate the positive impact on student performance when microcomputers are effectively…

The graduate school at the University of Michigan (UM) is seeking to identify the characteristics of a high quality graduate education, taking into account various aspects of quality that are susceptible to numerical analysis as well as those that are not. Contemporary research universities are composed of many autonomous spheres (undergraduate…

The Memphis Apple Classroom of Tomorrow (ACOT), one of seven ACOT locations, was a joint project of the city schools and Apple Computer. The ACOT consisted of a class of 30 fifth grade students in an inner city school, who were selected on the basis of the willingness of the students and their parents to participate and to use computers in the…

Evaluating the Writing To Read program (a computer-based reading/writing program developed by IBM for kindergarten children), a study examined the impact of the program on student achievement in the District of Columbia Public Schools. Writing To Read teaches students 42 phonetic sounds in the context of words that allow students to begin writing…

A survey of 50 college writing programs to ascertain what kind of training is being offered to student teachers revealed the significance of peer support and involvement and raised the following questions: (1) Can peers offer advice and support which is different from that offered by faculty and administrators? (2) Do graduate student teachers…