Focus group interviews were held with approximately 60 of the several hundred high school students who are participating in school-to-work transition programs offered through the Kalamazoo County (Michigan) Education for Employment (EFE) consortium, The 10 focus groups held involved 5-8 students each and were distributed across program types as…

This collection of 18 essays are based on sessions and keynote speeches at the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) Conference held at Dyffrwn House, Cardiff (Wales) in November 1993. They represent the reworked and distilled thoughts of the presenters after they had had the experience of leading a workshop on a related topic. The…

This study examined factors that teachers say determine whether they modify new information about mathematics, mathematics learning, and mathematics teaching to fit their existing conceptions or whether they restructure their existing conceptions. Three female teachers (two sixth grade and one fifth grade) from a rural, public school participated…

START was a dropout prevention project funded by Alberta Education and Alberta/NWT Region Human Resources Development Canada, successor to Employment and Immigration Canada. START addressed dropout prevention through a variety of school and community initiatives primarily targeting students in the junior high school years. In the 1993-94 school…

This report is made up of 20 case descriptions of tertiary level distance-delivered educational programs developed specifically for indigenous students in three countries: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Included in each case is a description of the institutions and stakeholders involved in each course or program, history of the initiative,…

Governments have traditionally left the plight of street children and working children, who by some counts number over 100 million, to individuals and nongovernmental organizations, including many religious organizations. As a result, there are a multitude of small, uncoordinated, but highly effective projects throughout the world concentrated in…

The relationship between high school restructuring and vocational reform was examined in case studies of two moderately large comprehensive California high schools that have undertaken schoolwide efforts to establish new forms of social organization for teachers' and students' work. Over the 2-year study period, several visits were made to each…

Learning styles have been identified as an important variable in the school success or failure of ethnic minorities in America. Whole language is compatible with the style of Native American children. Nebraska's Winnebago Public School teachers of Native American students use a method of writing instruction that is compatible with their preference…

This document and accompanying disk contain all of the articles from an "Education Week" special report examining the complex phenomenon commonly known as the "information highway" and how it affects the nation's schools. The articles, all by Peter West, include: (1) "Logged On for Learning," an overview of the…

This publication is a companion volume to a research report that examined local, national, and international interventions and initiatives aimed at promoting education and training for the informal sector. It provides four case studies on types of initiatives being taken by a wide range of actors in the area of education and training.…

The importance of dialogue in developing community leadership among diverse groups is described. In the context of South Carolina's Penn School for Preservation, ways communities can create diverse leadership cadres working toward common goals are explored. Common assumptions about the effectiveness of current leadership training methods are…

A study at Barry University (Florida), a private, urban comprehensive university investigated factors in student retention. Demographic data, standardized test scores, and academic performance data were gathered for almost 3,000 students entering the university between fall 1991 and spring 1995. In addition, the students were surveyed on…

A study used Alexander Astin's (1993) Input-Environment-Output (I-E-O) model to examine persistence at the United States Coast Guard Academy (Connecticut). Because the study was conducted in a controlled social environment, measures of social environmental influence were derived from multiple inputs, including adaptability polls wherein every…

Theories of situated learning attempt to overcome the ill-structured nature of some domains of learning, and to use students' tendencies to construct knowledge representation on context and prior experience. Success comes when students apply abstract principles to real life. This study compares the effectiveness of two different lesson structures…

Noting that children's perceptions of literacy and of themselves as learners differ from those of adults, this book documents how Sarah, from the ages of 2 to 5 years, understood literacy and invented reading and writing for herself. Numerous reading and writing samples in the book, organized around broad research questions, present Sarah as an…