States, districts and schools are now being offered unprecedented opportunities to develop programs that will improve student performance and turn around underperforming schools. An understanding of how reducing chronic early absence helps those efforts will go a long way to assure that innovative school improvement policies and practices will be…

This comprehensive text helps prepare pre-service and in-service teachers to build and sustain family, school, and community partnerships that are vital to student success. Focusing on grades preK-8, and with a particular emphasis on diverse families and learners, this book helps teachers to overcome barriers, create action plans, and sustain…

This is an exploratory study suggesting ways of analysing challenges for developing countries in the move to greater inclusion of disabled children and young people in learning. The paper focuses on pedagogical challenges to realising more inclusive education. Pedagogy encompasses not only the practice of teaching and learning, but also the ideas…

Large-scale assessment regularly takes place in most jurisdictions across Canada, a fact not lost on the Fraser Institute and other right wing think tanks such as AIMS (Atlantic Institute for Market Studies) which use the test results as the primary basis for compiling school rankings at both the elementary and secondary level (see Gutstein,…

What does the literature say about effective transition between the high school and post-secondary education? A disturbing number of students leave college without completing their degree or earning the credential they sought. This problem, which is especially acute for poor, minority and rural students, results in a colossal waste of talent,…

This work, part of the Spanish government's National I + D Plan 2004/07, entitled "Observatics: the implementation of free software in ICT centres in Andalusia: an analysis of its effect on the teaching-learning process", aims to describe the most recent impact of online communication technologies on education in Andalusia (Spain),…

This research explores the role of "advancement-enabling" technology in helping institutions meet their development and alumni relations goals. It includes data on how technology is being used, barriers to effective use of technology, and strategies for effective deployment of technology. The report is based on data provided by 357…

Despite their apparent popularity among those seeking degrees and credentials, today's colleges and universities face several interrelated public criticisms and concerns. When these competing concerns about student success, productivity, cost, and educational effectiveness all collide at the campus level, they create an array of campus tensions…

Blended learning, mixing online and face-to-face learning modes, has been increasingly adopted in training with the expectation that it will help solve transfer problems and will lend other educational benefits. While there is a set of knowledge about design for facilitating transfer, it has not been investigated in a blended environment context.…

This article draws upon two qualitative studies with internationally educated teachers and teacher assistants in preschools in Iceland as well as ethnic minority student teachers at the Iceland University of Education. The common research question in both studies is whether the experiences of these teachers reveal barriers to integration within…

Over the last few years, increasing scholarly and media attention has been paid to the plight of undocumented immigrant college students. However, only a small fraction of undocumented youth actually moves on from high school to postsecondary opportunities. Indeed, the exclusion from financial aid eligibility and low family socioeconomic status…

Objective: Determine relationships between self-efficacy, decisional balance, and processes of change and Stages of Change (SOC) related to fruit and vegetable (FV) availability among Hispanic Head Start parents. Design: A 2-phase descriptive study with mixed methodology. Setting: Two Head Start sites in a city in the midwestern United States.…

When environmental education manifests itself in schools, it is usually a simple matter of the insertion of an environment-related activity into the science, or perhaps social studies, curriculum. However, if one finds a teacher who has "the ethic," the entire school might be "green." The fact that this ethic is spreading…

In this paper, I map important "messy" elements that I learned from my five-month small-scale research project, one that was designed around pivotal works on online social research. I used computers and the Internet with Minan, a young man living in Guinea, West Africa, in order to examine his perceptions surrounding the value of these…

This case study examined a multi-college community college district in northern California in a primarily rural area, to understand how their practices compared to management best practices designed to improve student success, barriers that may exist in implementing best practices, and how the institution may improve its own practices. The problem…