This case study looked at 76 randomly selected preservice science teachers from Mbire and Guruve districts who were learning at the Mushumbi Centre in Zimbabwe and assessed their motivations for enrolling under the Bindura University of Science Education (BUSE)'s Virtual and Open Distance Learning (VODL) programme. It also looked at the challenges…

Transgenerational effects of alcohol on mothers' and children's intellectual functioning has been examined in 22 families from very deprived environments. Their psychosocial outcomes and IQ level were evaluated in a follow-up study on average seven years after they left the support group of a day-care centre for young children; school data were…

This paper describes the prevailing academic scenarios of a representative group of secondary schools in Assam (India) with special references to students performance in general and mathematics performance in particular. The state of Assam is one of the economically backward regions of India and is witnessing socio-political disturbances mainly…

In late 2010, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Rajiv Shah commissioned a new Agency-wide Education Strategy to ensure that USAID's global education investments would be informed by recent Presidential policy guidance; grounded in the most current evidence-based analysis of educational effectiveness; and aimed at…

In this case study, we examined the effects of two instructional methods, Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) and Collaborative Reasoning (CR), on students' written and oral arguments. Using an interview, we also explored students' understanding of academic arguments and their perceptions about the instruction. The students were 38 middle…

This study aims to examine the key barriers to learning to raise achievement of White British pupils with low-income backgrounds. The main findings suggest that the worryingly low-achievement levels of many White working class pupils have been masked by the middle class success in the English school system and government statistics that fail to…

Shifting focus from income to capability signifies an important milestone toward accurately measuring poverty and deprivation. This paper operationalizes capability deprivation in the United States and compares measurement outcomes among various capability approaches and between capability and income spaces. Of the three capability approaches…

The low literacy rates in developing countries have been repeatedly problematized as a major constraint to socioeconomic development by education planners and policy makers. In the 1950s and 1960s, the dominant rationale for literacy development was one of promoting economic growth. In more recent years, by contrast, literacy has increasingly come…

Using a variant of the ecological-transactional model and developmental theories of delinquency on a nationally representative sample of adolescents, the current study explored the ecological predictors of violent victimization, perpetration, and both for three different developmental stages during adolescence. We examined the relative influence…

"Poor white trash" is likely the most enduring and degrading in a long line of "stigmatypes"--"stigmatizing boundary terms that simultaneously denote and enact cultural and cognitive divides between in-groups and out-groups"--such as "redneck," "cracker," and "hillbilly." Some people…

We examined inattention/overactivity (I/O) over time and in relation to caregiving in three matched groups: (1) Romanian Orphans (RO) with a minimum of eight months' deprivation prior to adoption, (2) Early Adopted (EA) children adopted from Romania prior to age four months, and (3) Canadian Born (CB) non-adopted children. Comparisons among groups…

This paper estimates the effect of the childhood environment on a large array of social and economic outcomes lasting almost 60 years, for both the affected cohorts and for their children. To do this, we exploit a natural experiment provided by the 1949 Magic Carpet operation, where over 50,000 Yemenite immigrants were airlifted to Israel. The…

Philippe Bourgois, who has spent his career studying some of America's roughest neighborhoods and subcultures, got an unusually harsh welcome to his new hometown: Last May, during a trip to North Philly to make contact with some drug dealers, he got caught up in a police raid. The arrest was Bourgois's first, though hardly his first brush with…

Background: Children growing up in poor versus affluent neighborhoods are more likely to spend time in prison, develop health problems and die at an early age. The question of how neighborhood conditions influence our behavior and health has attracted the attention of public health officials and scholars for generations. Online tools are now…

The Rural Studio, an outreach program of Auburn University, designs innovative houses for poor people living in Alabama's Hale County by using "junk" such as car windshields, carpet tiles, baled cardboard, and old license plates. The article theorizes this particular architecture in terms of Critical Regionalism, developed by…