Describes an undergraduate college/high school integrated class in Buffalo State College's interactive classroom. This entry-level course was in study skills and reading, and was joined by interactive television to three urban, rural, and suburban high schools through Project Jump Start. Experiences show that the interactive classroom bridges…

Discusses factors related to parental involvement and reading achievement, including the benefits of parents reading to children, home environment factors, socioeconomic factors, barriers to parental involvement, and school involvement. Investigates whether parental involvement made a difference in the reading achievement of 30 second graders in a…

Describes the formation of the new "California Reading Initiative" that directly ties school funding to practices such as teaching phonemic awareness and systematic, explicit phonics. Assesses its research base, and discusses problems in teaching Limited-English-Proficient students to read following its directives. Presents research that supports…

Examines factors affecting the success of asynchronous online learning both through a review of the research and through an empirical investigation of student perceptions and course design factors in one of the largest asynchronous learning networks in the United States. Reveals that three such factors-consistency in course design, contact with…

A University of Sydney (Australia) study investigated novice and expert college faculty's concepts of teaching effectiveness, self-efficacy regarding teaching, and criteria for self-evaluation as teachers. Differences were found in all of these areas, and implications for achieving excellence in teaching are discussed. (Author/MSE)

Summarizes a class project that attempts to make students more aware of the pervasiveness of women's images in culture and how gender norms shape women's status in society. Class consists of innovative writing assignments, discussions, informal presentations, and collection of cultural artifacts. Includes descriptions of these activities and…

Presents a historical summary of Russian pedagogical thought concerning cognitive style and different learning strategies. As early as 1832 Russian educators were questioning the rigid standardized teaching strategies applied to all students. Identifies leading theorists in this movement and briefly discusses their contributions. (MJP)

Describes a qualitative action research study that investigated the effectiveness of an assignment for tenth graders that required primary research methods and an essay. Topics include authentic research; constructivist theory of learning; performance-based assessment; student journals; peer editing; teacher-librarian collaboration; and student…

Summarizes research on educational programs that use stigmatized varieties of English in the classroom, and reviews relevant theory and research in psycholinguistics and second language acquisition. Research on educational programs shows that using the stigmatized variety in formal education seems to have a positive effect on the acquisition of…

This study examined hands-on experiences in the context of an investigation of viruses and explored how and why hands-on experiences may be effective. We sought to understand whether or not touching and manipulating materials and objects could lead to a deeper, more effective type of knowing than that we obtain from sight or sound alone. Four…

This study explored preservice teachers' (n = 25) knowledge structures and their mastery of content knowledge in relation to their ability to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of a fourth grader's videotaped explanations of a scientific phenomenon, i.e., molecular kinetic properties of air. Participants' knowledge structures were analyzed…

This chapter describes Santa Fe Community College's use of the Noel-Levitz Student Satisfaction Inventory to guide iterative development of institutional improvements associated with student satisfaction.

In this paper we present a simple set-up that illustrates the mechanism of sap ascent in plants and demonstrates that it can easily draw water up to heights of a few meters. The set-up consists of a tube with the lower end submerged in water and the upper one connected to a filter supported by a standard filter-holder. The evaporation of water…

This project aimed to examine whether the use of computers could have a positive impact on the performance of academic tasks and their behaviour whilst completing them of children with ADHD. This small exploratory study therefore investigated the impact of the use of a laptop computer, with and without stimulating animations and features…

This study examines the skills that recent technical communication graduates and managers believe technical communication students need before entering business and industry as new technical communicators. Through questionnaires and interviews with recent graduates and managers of technical communication departments as well as an analysis of the…