West Virginia University's five-year preservice teacher education program prepares general education teachers for students with special needs. Using a strand approach, special education learning outcomes and competencies have been incorporated into core education courses. A survey of 72 program participants and 11 faculty members indicates…

Compares English programs in schools that were "Beating the Odds" (that is, whose students were performing unusually well on locally important tests when compared with students in schools serving similar populations) with English programs whose students were performing more typically. Discusses five features of the successful programs. (SG)

This article discusses integrating thinking skills into the regular curriculum to meet the special needs of gifted children. It defines thinking skills, describes three common approaches used to teach them (stand-alone, immersion, and embedded), and demonstrates how they can be embedded in any curriculum at all levels. (Contains eight references.)…

Student success was the motivation for evolving an individual project-based course into a project-centric curriculum. A one semester project was first extended across a sequence of three interrelated courses tied together through their focus on the success of small team projects that spanned those courses. This sequence was then targeted as the…

"Johnny" may be learning more about reading and mathematics, but he may have little time to study the discoveries of Columbus, the tenets of the U.S. Constitution, or the social and political causes of the Civil War. Those time-honored topics--as well as lesser-known events and figures throughout history--are fighting to maintain their…

Lesson and unit plans designed by preservice teachers who developed their plans using the backward design model or a traditional model of curriculum design were compared. Two independent raters scored 153 lesson and unit plans developed by preservice teachers in two different sections of Educational Planning and Management. The plans were…

Defining "curriculum" is difficult, because, as a multidimensional term, it has been given a variety of definitions throughout the years. Although the curriculum field has deepened and diversified impressively during the past decades, it still seems unlikely that any definition will ever fully capture all the meanings, characteristics,…

It is argued that a positive response to lifelong learning policies involves the use of imaginative curriculum design in order to attract learners from disadvantaged backgrounds who are otherwise alienated from higher education. In this article a case study is presented based on the popularity of science fiction within popular culture, beginning…

We discuss the status of the scientist-practitioner model in marriage and family therapy (MFT) doctoral programs. Issues discussed include a lack of faculty research role models in doctoral programs, "farming out" the majority of research courses to other disciplines, problems with curriculum, and how the culture of MFT does not support research.…

Science teachers continually search for effective ways to help students make sense of science concepts and principles. For students to learn to think more like scientists, science teachers must decrease the number of lectures and "follow-the-recipe" laboratory experiments and increase the use of activities that incorporate student inquiry.…

This paper addresses the problem of placing and teaching heritage speakers of immigrant languages in college-level foreign language programmes, drawing conclusions from research on heritage speakers of Russian. For pedagogical purposes, heritage speakers cannot be viewed either as native speakers of the target language or as foreign language…

Business needs in many corporations call for learning outcomes that involve problem solutions, and creating and sharing new knowledge within workplace situations that may involve collaboration among members of a team. We argue that work-based activities (WBA) and computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) are appropriate components for…

Modern education is in a state of global crisis partially because of the absence of a value-based design of its strategic functions. Education affects the whole spectrum of human values, namely, creative, experiential, aesthetic, material, instrumental, ethical, social, and spiritual values. A student whose educational experience involves this…

While the last decade has been marked by widespread advocacy for integrating information and communication technologies (ICTs) across school curriculum, teachers' understandings of the nature of electronic literacies in the learning process have received far less attention. This has been the case despite the accelerated growth, miniaturisation and…

In the last years, Instructional Design has seen the development of visual notation systems for supporting and enhancing the design process. Some of them concern the definition of learning goals, while others address the definition of learning activities or learning materials. These tools supposedly reduce the cognitive load and enhance design…