Reports a two-phase project aimed at developing critical language awareness through the teaching of Portuguese. During the first phase, 13-year-olds in a Brazilian state school evaluated their Portuguese lessons, and identified features they felt needed altering to develop critical awareness of language and social reality. Changes were proposed…

States have accumulated considerable experience in operating publicly sponsored pre-kindergarten programs. In spite of this extensive experience, only fragmentary accounts exist of how these pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs handle issues such as program intensity, location, staffing, and population served. These issues are addressed by the…

In this paper we present two studies that examine mentoring supports for alternative certification teachers from three perspectives: pre-interns, mentor teachers, and site administrators. The diverse sample population allowed us to study the role of race, gender, age, and prior careers in six domains of teacher learning and in their beliefs about…

To reduce curricular fragmentation in science education, reform recommendations include using common, unifying themes such as scaling to enhance curricular coherence. This study involved 215 participants from five groups (grades 5, 7, 9, and 12, and doctoral students), who completed written assessments and card sort tasks related to their…

A formative assessment pretest was administered to undergraduate students at the beginning of a science course in order to find out their prior knowledge, misconceptions and learning difficulties on the topic of the human respiratory system and energy issues. Those findings could provide their instructors with the valuable information required in…

The purpose of this study was to examine changes in personal science teaching self-efficacy (PSTE), outcome expectancy (STOE), and science conceptual understanding and relationships among these in preservice teachers. Seventy preservice teachers enrolled in science teaching methods courses participated in this study. PSTE, STOE, and science…

This document, which is intended for curriculum managers at British further education colleges, presents guidelines for developing and implementing a college assessment policy based on the principle that the objectives of all assessment procedures and policies are as follows: enhance the assessment provision within colleges; ensure that assessment…

A study examined the practical issues involved in providing continuity/progression for students who had undertaken General National Vocational Qualifications (GNVQs) and National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) programs at key stage 4 of the British National Curriculum, and who were moving on to further study in post-16 colleges. Data were…

This booklet has been written to help persons interested in assessment of education and training programs in general and competency-based vocational education programs in particular. The following topics are covered in the individual sections: the meaning of the term "assessment"; the importance of assessment; curriculum models; percentages and…

This volume of working papers in psycholinguistics, from the "MITA Psycholinguistics Circle", contains the following articles: "Some Problems in the Acquisition of Derived Nouns" (Mika Endo); "World Knowledge in Children's Sentence Comprehension" (Yuki Hirose); "Examining the Including and Excluding Roles of…

Two studies examine the nature of Japanese elementary school and junior high school students' preconceptions about media, the effects of teachers on these preconceptions, and the effect of such preconceptions on learning from instruction in multimedia situations. In the first study, 109 fifth graders reported their preconceptions toward watching…

The guide consists of a series of sample lesson plans designed for teachers and supervisors delivering instructional services to students with limited English proficiency and native language literacy in Haitian bilingual programs. The guides contain 14 sample lesson plans; five native language instruction sample lesson plans and nine content area…

These proceedings contain 17 papers from plenary sessions, workshops, and other presentations at a conference to consider and clarify major issues in assessment and standards in vocational education and training, including identification of problems and suggested solutions. A summary of discussions follows most presentations. Plenary session…

People use and extend their knowledge of the physical world constantly. Understanding how this fluency is achieved would be an important milestone in understanding human learning and intelligence, as well as a useful guide for constructing machines that learn. This paper presents a theoretical framework that is being developed in an attempt to…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 19 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) factual, elaborative, and inferential levels of text processing; (2) the effect of explicitly and implicitly presented rhetorical functions on the…