The high school completion rate for the U.S. has increased only slightly over the last quarter of a century. A promising area of focus for dropout prevention efforts may be found in research that assesses how messages about educational attainment may affect school completion rates. The supportive communication framework is used to address how…

This preliminary study examined the effect of a caring-based versus a traditionally-focused physical activity intervention on underserved adolescents' perceptions of the caring climate, the motivational climate, empathetic concern, enjoyment, and future anticipated participation. Multiethnic youth (N = 353) aged 9 to 17 involved in two National…

The activities and self-direction allowed after school provide children in different countries with distinct developmental opportunities that promote culturally valued orientations and outcomes. Fourth-grade children in Bulgaria, Taiwan, and the United States (countries with contrasting social values and expectations) reported their usual…

This chapter presents an autoethnography of a Chinese American woman's twenty-five years of experience in higher education at universities in Southern California and the Pacific Northwest. Her career is discussed in four stages: master's teaching assistant and student, part-time instructor, doctoral teaching assistant and student, and professor.

What teaching strategies must teachers of reading be able to perform and how are these strategies applied effectively in teaching children to read? This article attempts to answer these two important questions. One key element of a successful reading program focuses on the teacher. A brief review of the teacher effectiveness literature, including…

Closing the achievement gap between low- and high-achieving public school students is an important goal of public education. This article explores background information and research and discusses examples of best practices to close the achievement gap. Several plans have been proposed as ways to enhance the achievement of under-represented…

Background: Scholars are bringing much-needed attention to the persistent problem of academic underachievement among African American children in the United States, who continue to lag behind White school children in all socioeconomic groups. This is especially true of impoverished African Americans. Although some link these outcomes to poor…

This study investigated the influence of two contextual factors, parental involvement and perceived career barriers, on math/science goals. Using social cognitive career theory (SCCT; Lent, Brown, & Hackett, 1994), a path model was tested to investigate hypothesized relationships between math- and science-related efficacy beliefs (i.e., task and…

The objective of this qualitative study was to establish the existing positive factors in the lives of 18 juvenile males living in a low-security correctional facility in order to determine approaches which foster resiliency. Urie Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Theory, an approach to understanding human development within the context of the…

The life history method, which achieved a prominent position in the Chicago tradition of sociological research in the early 1920s, has been widely adopted for educational inquiries since the 1980s. The power of the life history method in illuminating subjective teacher experiences in social historical contexts has made it "probably the only…

Much has been written recently about the ways many high schools are failing students, but much less has been written about the ways successful high schools manage to maintain standards of excellence for all students, pursuing high academic standards while still closing the achievement gap. This report focuses on successful high schools,…

This study examined teaching practices in undergraduate education by surveying 180 undergraduate students and 29 faculty, most in the school of education, at the Rio Piedras Campus of the University of Puerto Rico. Factors investigated include: (1) degree of agreement between faculty and students on good teaching practices; (2) relationship…

Student socioeconomic status (SES) and the perceptions of students' and teachers' expectations and attributions of responsibility for learning and their relationships to achievement were studied using linear structural equation modeling. Two models were developed and tested. One model included student expectations and attributions of…

This "Handbook" offers a broad definition of family and community engagement, seen through the lens of scholars and practitioners with a wide-ranging set of perspectives on why and how families, communities, and schools collaborate with one another. Taken together, the chapters in this "Handbook" sketch out the components of a…

A meta-analytic review of published and unpublished intervention studies to change teachers' attitudes and behaviors toward students with disabilities was conducted in order to clarify the concepts of exceptionalities, attitudes, and change. The second objective of this study was to examine the moderating variables that may account for disparate…