The impact of large-scale testing on curriculum policies at district and school levels and on science teaching at the classroom level was studied for British Columbia (Canada). Other factors affecting teaching practices were considered. In 1983, the Province reintroduced centrally set and graded province-wide examinations for grade 12, following a…

A project evaluated the overall effectiveness of the Advanced Courses Development Programme (ACDP) of the Scottish Vocational Education Council. A peer review of selected Higher National (HN) unit specifications involved 195 subject experts who completed evaluation questionnaires on specifications in their specialist areas. The main body of the…

A study field tested and evaluated an instructional approach to parent education that tried, from a developmental perspective, to help parents become aware of their parenting practices. A program was developed to support parents in becoming aware of personal themes and actions that influenced the nature of parent-child interaction and in becoming…

An overview is provided of the evaluation of the Lighthouse Project, an education enhancement project that began in one urban and two suburban districts. Its methodology was the context for showing how the focus on the results of a standardized achievement test in mathematics inhibited the implementation of mathematics reform in the elementary…

Teachers at the Ganado Primary School in rural Arizona established an instructional team to form a "School-within-a-School" (SWAS). The school is located on the Navajo reservation and serves 450 K-2 students who are predominately "at risk" and limited-English-proficient. Over a period of 8 months, the faculty researched and…

Increasing shortages of skilled workers have resulted in numerous changes and innovations in vocational-technical education (VTE). The overriding objective of these changes/innovations is to improve youths' work readiness. At the secondary level, school systems have adopted business-sponsored programs and integrated them into curricula. Efforts to…

Consistent with education reform efforts, the achievement of systemic change in American education demands that school improvement efforts be fused with professional development opportunities that lead to self-renewal for teachers. This report emanates from a 5-day conference of the Christa McAuliffe Institute for Educational Pioneering (CMI), an…

This book explores the aims and strategies of the Educational Fostering movement (EFO), a collection of educational policies in Israel that are intended to narrow gaps in educational opportunities and achievement between ethnic minorities and the ethnic majority. Educational fostering is aimed at students who are marginalized contextually or…

In response to the increasing numbers of displaced workers due to corporate downsizing, Pellissippi State Technical Community College, in Tennessee, has initiated the Workplace Innovation (WIN) Project to help adults gain prerequisite academic and personal skills to re-enter the workforce or enter college for eventual placement in higher-paying…

The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) in Aurora (Illinois) is a pioneering educational community, the nation's only three-year publicly funded residential high school. Its mission requires the achievement of two separate goals: (1) the education of the gifted young of Illinois in science and mathematics and (2) the sharing of…

Open Doors is a family literacy program that was developed to provide basic literacy training and basic skills remediation for homeless single mothers who have not completed high school and developmental enrichment services for their infants and toddlers. Open Doors was designed to provide interventions to 30 families. The program featured…

Utilizing self-report data from 32 elementary and secondary teachers, this longitudinal, qualitative study examines the role shifts of both teachers and students as they adapted to teaching and learning in educational, technology-rich, Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow environments. At first, teachers in these instructionally innovative classrooms…

The effectiveness of computers and related information technologies in changing educational environments is largely determined by the presence of three conditions: (1) good advance planning; (2) appropriate and extensive inservice training; and (3) easily accessible high quality courseware/software. Utah is an example of a state that has…

Offices are places in which information is generated and processed. According to the classic theories of labor organization, human activities can be roughly divided into two main families: manual and intellectual. Each family can be broken down into three basic stages: planning, performance, and supervision. The families and basic stages can be…

Designed to provide a concise description of traditional instructional techniques, as well as more recent technology-based techniques, this 11-part guidebook includes the following sections: (1) "The Value of Planning"; (2) "Aids to Effective Instruction," reviewing the reasons for employing learning objectives, Bloom's taxonomy of objectives for…