The present study assesses the impact of attending colleges with higher black enrollment on African Americans' self-esteem and self-efficacy. It tests Rosenberg's proposition that racially "consonant" environments enhance self-appraisals. The LISREL models control for various pre-college attributes and for institutional selectivity.…

This is the third in a series of studies examining young students' attitudes toward and knowledge about computers. Data were collected at the end of students' third and fourth grade academic years and analyzed with respect to their "love" of computers, their feelings of competence in using them, and the number of computer terms they…

This study tested the effects of linguistic qualifiers and intensifiers on the number and types of replies elicited per argument and per challenge posted in online debates. To facilitate collaborative argumentation, thirty-two students (22 females, 10 males) enrolled in a graduate-level online course classified and labeled their messages as…

Our purpose here is to discuss education policy issues in the context of empirical evidence. We note that many commonly held beliefs about Australian education such as, the relative performance and participation levels of Australian students; the importance of socioeconomic background on educational outcomes both relative to other countries and…

Understanding and preventing high school failure is a national priority. Structural strain and general deviance theories attempt to explain late high school failure. The authors tested the hypotheses that general (vs. specific) deviance and academic competence mediate the relationships between structural strain factors (gender, ethnicity, and…

Since 1996, our research team has conducted 15 focus groups with 169 middle-school youth in small communities as formative research for campaigns against alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and violence. Some key findings of a synthesis of focus-group results are that girls and boys perceive different risks to alcohol and tobacco use; peer relationships are…

For many decades now the sphere of education in Russia has been considered to be among the most well off among other spheres of activity, from the standpoint of gender equality. One component of radical economic reforms in Russia in the 1990s was the transformation of education financing. During the reform years the number of students in higher…

Jeb Bush campaigned for Governor on a clear and bracing set of education reforms in 1998. Having won office, he immediately pursued a dual track strategy of education reform: standards and accountability for public schools, choice options for dissatisfied parents. Florida lawmakers followed these reforms with additional measures, including…

More than a dozen statistical models have been developed for the purpose of cognitive diagnosis. These models are supposed to extract a much finer level of information from item responses than traditional unidimensional item response models. In this paper, a general diagnostic model (GDM) was used to analyze a set of simulated sparse data and real…

Rapid changes in technology make it necessary for adults of all ages to use written information in new and more complex ways. For example, learning how to operate computers, filling out complicated tax forms, and comparing price labels when shopping for groceries are just a few of the many tasks that are important parts of peoples lives. Every…

Research reveals that the division between reading and writing hinders the development of language learning in general and writing ability in specific. The study examined the effect of using the reading for writing approach on developing the writing ability of Egyptian EFL learners and their attitudes towards writing. Thirty, first year secondary…

This report presents results for the first trial school-district-level science assessment in NAEP at grades 4 and 8. Ten urban public-school districts voluntarily participated: Atlanta City, Austin Independent School District, Boston School District, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, City of Chicago School District 299, Cleveland City School…

This volume--the second in a two-volume set from the Monitoring the Future study--provides findings on the substance use and related behaviors of several segments of the adult population. It also contains findings on attitudes and beliefs about drugs, as well as on several particularly salient dimensions of their social environments. Volume I…

This report provides annualized enrollment information for the Wyoming community college system for the 2005-2006 academic year. During this year, credit headcount at Wyoming's community colleges increased by 6.1%, the largest annual enrollment increase during the last decade. The report also indicates that the difference between enrollments of…

This report includes Fall 2005 semester enrollment information for Wyoming's seven comprehensive community colleges. Selected data includes student counts by credit hours, county, full-time students (FTE), program or study, ethnicity and a ten-year history. (Contains 12 tables.) [For Summer 2005 enrollment report, see ED502746.]