The institutional view of literature in the National Curriculum of Great Britain shows a dramatic belittlement in its revised version. It lacks a coherent literary or pedagogical rationale and substitutes a functional one in which over-simplification purports to be clarification. The institution is primarily concerned to define English literary…

This study examined the effects of public service advertising from two theoretical backgrounds: social learning theory and social control theory. Traditional social learning theory assumes that learning occurs by subjects performing responses and experiencing their effects, with reinforcement as the main determinant. Social control theory, as…

This study attempts to gain information concerning the receptive, as opposed to the creative, aesthetic experience by talking to museum professionals who spend their working lives identifying, appraising, and explicating works of art. The study is based on an underlying assumption that rules and practices for looking at art exist and must be…

This paper looks at alternative assessment and explores its place in educational reform. It gives a snapshot of alternative assessment in practice, guidelines for establishing it as part of the urban school culture, and resources for additional information. Alternative assessments differ from traditional tests in that they require students to…

Students' conversational skills, sense of importance, and penchant for creating drama can create thoughtful and even powerfully compelling prose but only if readers let it. Unfortunately, the ways that beginning writers express ideas do not always match all readers' expectations. What does this have to do with what teacher-researchers call voice?…

The New Hampshire State Department of Education in conjunction with the state board and the Legislature, has implemented a new statewide educational improvement and assessment program. The purpose of the program is "to establish what New Hampshire students should know and be able to do and to develop and implement effective methods for…

This report, second in a series, contains school and district level data on student performance at the end of the primary grades. It provides a source of information to evaluate current school improvement efforts and facilitate decisions about curriculum, instruction, professional development, resource allocation, and staffing. The statewide…

This report describes what schools and educators across Kentucky are doing to implement school reform in performance assessment based on the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 (KERA). It provides research-based suggestions about how implementation of programs can be enhanced and how the benefits of reform increased for the Kentucky youth.…

The strategies in this book, geared for students from grades 4-8, are designed to bring literature to life for students, and to encourage students to become lifelong readers. The first section of the book presents four "'Into' Activities" that are designed to get students excited and curious about what they are about to read and to build students'…

A study applied Relevance Theory to interpretation of texts written in Ghanaian English, particularly those intended for reading by multiple audiences. The nature of such "hybrid" texts is examined and key principles of Relevance Theory are outlined. Relevance is defined in terms of contextual effect and processing effort. Contextual…

This book offers time-saving tips from teachers on writing effective report card comments. The book presents the best strategies, tips, and lists of useful phrases that encourage children and lists words to avoid. It is a resource that will allow teachers to collect assessment information easily and to describe students' performances clearly and…

This report discusses the results of a study of 21 special education teachers from urban, mid-sized, and rural school districts that investigated whether teacher cognition would differ according to the characteristics of students in a classroom and the social environment in which teaching takes place. In the study, a stimulated recall procedure…

This biannual review of research describes promising research models that are helping all students, including students with disabilities, manage their own behavior in school settings. The common features of school-wide systems of behavioral support are identified and include: (1) total staff commitment to managing behavior; (2) clearly defined and…

Biased social information processing has been solidly linked to aggressive behavior in children. Additionally, attributional tendencies, the tendency to overattribute deliberately hostile intentions to others, have been shown to distinguish aggressive and nonaggressive male youth. In order to reduce aggressive males' tendency to attribute hostile…

This manual provides documentation and guidance for users of the public release data file for the School Safety and Discipline component of the 1993 National Household Education Survey (NHES:93). Information about the purpose of the study, the data collection instruments, the sample design, and data collection and processing is presented. The…