Exploring what happened in the classroom as a teacher used a whole language approach with her culturally varied, urban fourth-grade students, this report tells the story of a unit on personal, narrative writing which occurred from April to June. The report describes how the teacher established routines to make the unit work, and how the teacher…

Covering a wide variety of issues of concern to educators, the papers compiled in this proceedings report present graduate student research on writing instruction, mathematics instruction, cooperative learning groups, a follow-up program to Project Head Start, relationships between language and music, and the self-concept of gifted children. The…

This collection of articles by 15 leading researchers and teachers explores the social, cognitive, and pedagogical aspects of developing biliteracy--literacy in two languages. Chapters include the following: "Inheriting Sins While Seeking Absolution: Language Diversity and National Data Sets" (Reynaldo Macias); "Sociolinguistic…

In developing a model for institutional assessment, John Wood Community College (JWCC), in Quincy, Illinois, decided to use student learning as the foundation of evaluation, as opposed to the activities and services offered by the college. This performance-based approach to institutional assessment was then expanded to reshape the process by which…

This report reviews the personnel psychology literature related to training effectiveness and summarizes it into a three-dimensional matrix. Following an introduction, section II discusses how three components of training studies--training content, training method, and transfer of training--can be considered within a three-dimensional framework.…

Appalachia Educational Laboratory's Rural Excel program collaborated with the Tennessee Center of Excellence for Science and Mathematics Education and with faculty at 21 local education agencies in rural Tennessee to evaluate implementation of the Tennessee Mathematics Activities Manuals for grades 5-8. The manuals each contain 54-67 activities…

This study assessed the effectiveness of a model for providing long distance technical assistance on teacher implementation of an intervention designed to increase child-child social interaction. Subjects were 10 preschool special education teachers and 40 preschool-aged children (some developing normally and some with mild to moderate…

This document is a collection of reviews of promising and exemplary programs designed to improve student achievement. The programs reviewed represent the five areas that hold particular promise for strengthening students' academic performance: improved instructional strategies in reading, writing, and thinking; and the use of educational…

Designed to identify teaching-learning strategies that can be facilitated by the use of technology and to specify factors and configurations that have impact on computer use in the classroom, this second-year study of computer use in Indiana schools focused on the effects of computer use on students and on teachers, the curriculum implications of…

Pedagogical content knowledge has been shown to be important to the work of teachers. This paper assumes it should be incorporated into the curriculum of teacher preparation and explores when and how that might be done. Results from the literature are reported in order to raise issues needing to be resolved before this question can be answered…

In problem-based learning, an instrument is needed to measure students' actual learning activities. Mapping the domain of learning activities undertaken by students and improving problems is especially important in a problem-based curriculum because students choose their own learning objectives. Such an instrument, the Topic Evaluation…

A study examined the effectiveness of a collaborative research and development project designed to enhance the academic competence of typically underserved minority students through instructional strategies which emphasize cooperative learning, maximize heterogeneous skill groupings, and focus on higher order thinking and communication skills.…

As a collaborative effort between Brown University (Rhode Island) and three secondary schools, an instructional hypermedia research project called ACCESS (American Culture in Context: Enrichment for Secondary Schools) has created a corpus for use at the high school level which contains a substantial amount of textual, pictorial, audio, and video…

Students in a graduate class and an undergraduate class in Information Systems completed a Web-based programmed instruction tutor that taught a simple Java applet as the first technical training exercise in a computer programming course. The tutor is a competency-based instructional system for individualized distance learning. When a student…

In this article, the author shares vocabulary development activities for young learners. These activities channel students' energy and make learning more effective and fun. The author stresses the importance of giving young learners a good language-learning experience, and the challenges of teaching young learners who are not literate in their L1.…