This 2004 Annual Report to Congress has two volumes. Volume 1 focuses on the children and students being served under IDEA and provides profiles of individual states' special education environment. It contains three sections. Section I contains the child/student-focused material, presented in a question-and-answer format. It contains three…

Digitization of information and the Internet have profoundly expanded the capacity for openness. This report details the benefits of openness in three areas--open standards, open-source software, and open innovation--and examines the major issues in the debate over whether openness should be encouraged or not. The report explains each of these…

"Student Success" is EPI's occasional e-magazine dedicated to the discussion of retaining students in higher education. Over the course of the next issues of "Student Success," the Educational Policy Institute (EPI) will explore three questions about retention on our college campuses. Part I will look at the barriers to student retention, both…

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,…

Efforts to monitor the progress of U.S. education and respond to its opportunities and challenges depend on reliable, accurate, and timely data. To provide such data, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) each year submits to Congress the mandated report, The Condition of Education. This year's report presents indicators of important…

The purpose of this document is to identify the essential components of appropriate programming that are mandated by Alberta Education for students with special education needs, to provide examples of effective practices, to establish a common understanding of the terminology associated with this specialized field, and to clarify the meaning of…

When Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1997, it authorized an evaluation to track progress at the state and local levels on the legislative goals of IDEA. The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) commissioned a national longitudinal study, the Study of State and Local…

Trauma has the potential to undermine both the educational and personal achievement of students. This article will provide a review and an integration of theoretical and empirical literature on the prevention and treatment of stress disorders, particularly posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in children and teens. An initial review of the…

Using brain-based research, Douglass Elementary School in Boulder, Colorado, looked at the natural assets that both girls and boys bring to school and realized that its classrooms were generally a better fit for the verbal-emotive, sit-still, take-notes, listen-carefully, multitasking girl. Teachers tended to see the natural assets that boys bring…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of V.I.K. (Very Important Kids), a school-based, multi-component intervention designed to prevent teasing and unhealthy weight-control behaviors among fourth through sixth grade students. The effectiveness of the V.I.K. intervention was evaluated using a pre-post…

In this article, we draw on the example of the Friday Absenteeism Project, a photo voice project with sixth grade learners in a rural KwaZulu-Natal school, to interrogate the nature of participatory process and cultural production. In so doing, we explore a number of critical issues related to youth participation, including ethics, citizenship and…

This article examines the relationship between the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and learning and teaching, particularly in distance education contexts. We argue that environmental changes (societal, educational, and technological) make it necessary to adapt systems and practices that are no longer appropriate. The need…

This paper presents a model for advising Latino/a students in graduate social work programs. The model is based on ecological-systemic and empowerment theory and ascribes to the social work values and cultural competence standards proposed by the National Association of Social Workers. It has been developed within an institution that has sought…

College students who are no longer fully adolescent and not yet fully adult are frequently at risk for developing habits of excessive alcohol use, with consequent poor study habits and aberrant socialization patterns. "Weeding out" such trends is the work of prevention programs on campus. "Seeding" with other pro-social norms becomes the second…

The aim of this research was to explore unwanted sexual behaviour amongst young people. Sexual aggression was operationalized at three levels: "verbal", "non-verbal/intimidating" and "physically violent". A total of 1,700 Dutch adolescents completed a questionnaire that included six clusters of possible determinants…