In multilingual societies such as Botswana, language use is an extremely complex matter, further compounded by the fact that the languages involved are themselves dynamic phenomena that often elude the planned outcomes of policies which try to shape and constrain them. The paper describes the functional distribution of the national language…

This research report examines the comparative educational condition of Latinos in the United States. The report discusses the dramatic shortfalls that plague the educational outcomes of Latinos relative to other racial and ethnic groups. The outcomes studied include educational attainment, school and university enrollment, basic cognitive skills,…

This paper examines different institutional characteristics of Thai private higher education in historical-organizational perspective. The analysis applies different conceptual categories of private emergence--Catholic, elite, demand-absorbing--drawn from international literature starting with Levy (1986) to the Thai case. The societal context of…

This analytical review aims at exploring trends in educational access and delineating different groups, which are vulnerable to exclusion from educational opportunities at the elementary stage. This review has drawn references from series of analytical papers developed on different themes i.e. regional disparity in education, social equity and…

The central focus in this article is that how language is used can constitute the basis for power relations. In the first place, power functions through linguistic expressions in relationships of superiority and subordination (commands, reprimands etc.). Secondly, language acts can appear as representations of discourse, i.e. linguistic and…

Community service learning offers students the opportunity to cross socially constructed and epistemological borders of power and privilege, allowing them to come into contact with groups of people who are different from themselves and to learn in different ways. Peer facilitators, undergraduate student instructional leaders who guide others…

When Botswana gained independence from the British in 1966, a political decision was taken to designate English as an official language and Setswana, one of the indigenous languages, as a national language. This move disregarded the multilingual nature of Botswana society. Furthermore, although not explicitly stated, the use of other languages…

A look at the educational, economic, and family status of Colorado's Latino, African American, and Native American children reveals alarming problems. Latinos comprise the highest percentage of youth in the state and Whites the lowest. Numbers of young people (under age 19) are expected to increase in Colorado by 12% by 2020, but the increase in…

This paper reports on a correlational study of the relationship between adolescent alienation, demographic variables, and school variables. Participants were 466 students including Hispanics, Native Americans, and Whites from 4 public high schools in a Southwestern state. Students completed Mackey's Adolescent Alienation Scale and Ahlgren's…

The study investigated the social and vocational adjustment of 25 learning disabled young adults who received services in a Specific Learning Disability program during their elementary or secondary school years. Personal interviews were conducted using a 32-item questionnaire. Among findings were that 56% were living in their parents' homes; 60%…

This study assessed the extent to which the emergence and maintenance of peer group-status and behavior reflect the operation of group processes and individual processes. Of specific concern was whether support could be found for empirical relations derived from the self-perpetuation hypothesis. The study, which concerned the constructs of…

In Japan, absolute social status and power relationships among people are clearer than in the United States. The Japanese language supports this social system with the use of a special polite language ("keigo"), structural use of which is the same as polite language in English. The differences lie in the degrees of familiarity used and…

This document describes approaches in conducting naturalistic studies in two different countries with contrasting educational settings. Naturalistic research methodology is described by one of the writers as "an explicit undertaking to lay aside our ideas and concern ourselves with finding the subjects' perspectives in their non-theoretical…

Many studies in higher education have focused on the development of late adolescent and adult personality change on the assumption that such change was brought about by the college experience. The focus of this study is on the value changes that occur during college years and the changes that endure beyond college. Group and individual values…

A study explored whether children from lower class families would approach early writing with less confidence than children from other social classes. Subjects, 233 kindergarten children in all, represented four public elementary schools in very different settings: (1) an all-black low income neighborhood in the central city; (2) a white middle…