Charter schools--public schools of choice that are operated autonomously, outside the direct control of local school districts--have become more prevalent over the past two decades. There is no consensus about whether, on average, charter schools are doing better or worse than conventional public schools at promoting the achievement of their…

School improvement can be a complex, messy business. At its most basic, school improvement is change--change that might require people to abandon long-held beliefs and practices, shift roles, and learn new skills. Kilgore and Reynolds (2011) suggested that successful change requires that people change their perceptions as well as their actions.…

The purpose of this within-group experimental study was to find out to what extent ninth-grade students improved their science performance beyond their middle school science performance at one Georgia high school utilizing a freshman academy model. Freshman academies have been recognized as a useful tool for increasing academic performance among…

This working paper aims to give an overview of the national policies that exist in the field of information and communication technology (ICT) and initial teacher education. Information on this topic was initially gathered via a survey, in the form of a country questionnaire, which was conducted as part of the analytical strand of the the…

The Malaysian government has proposed to implement SBA (school-based assessment) in public schools with an attempt to replace the current public examinations. However, as SBA has yet to be in full swing, relatively little is known about the concerns of the teachers who would directly be involved in implementing SBA. This paper presents the…

Several decades of research have suggested a meaningful relationship between time and learning, where the amount of time students spend engaged in learning is strongly associated with their level of achievement. Among schools that have expanded the day and/or year, researchers have found that such a strategy can be quite effective, especially with…

Creativity is innately brought with secret power which can emerge at any time throughout life and be enhanced if fostered. Properly designed art activities serve as a potential for emergence and the enhancement of children's creativities in their early childhood educations. Those children who cannot express their emotions through oral language or…

English Language Learners (ELLs), a diverse group of individuals from across the world who are learning English for the first time, make up the fastest growing segment of the student population in United States public schools. ELL students are tasked with the two-fold challenge of learning a new language and simultaneously keeping up with academic…

This practical book will help school districts and teacher-education departments create and sustain effective partnerships to support teacher development. The authors--supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation--worked with school districts and universities on collaborating to improve pre- and inservice training for teachers. In this…

"Assessing Student Threats: A Handbook for Implementing the Salem-Keizer System" is a manual for the implementation of a threat assessment system that follows the recommendations of the Safe Schools Initiative and the prescriptive outline provided by the FBI. Written from an educator's perspective with contributing authors from law…

Teaching students how to conduct research that helps them develop a scholarly work is often a daunting task. A fortuitous collaboration between faculty members in the School of Education and the academic library led to the development of strategies for teaching graduate students how to conduct quality research. Over the course of four years,…

Children and adolescents of Latino/Hispanic background often face challenges that differ from other subpopulations in the United States. Language barriers, issues related to parental citizenship status, and the economic disadvantages often faced by these children and adolescents can result in various negative outcomes, such as depression,…

This report presents findings on the numbers and types of public elementary and secondary local education agencies (LEAs) in the United States and other jurisdictions in the 2009-10 school year, using data from the Local Education Agency Universe Survey of the Common Core of Data (CCD) survey system. The CCD is an annual collection of data that…

In her 1970s research at Hunter College Elementary School, Gertrude Hildreth discovered that the best way to explore gifted children was by observing these children in the educational setting. Many researchers usually expound on what should be done for gifted students, yet Hildreth found that much can be learned by formally observing gifted…

Information technology (IT) projects are unsuccessful at a rate of 65% to 75% per year, in spite of employing the latest technologies and training employees. Although many studies have been conducted on project successes in U.S. companies, there is a lack of research studying the impact of various factors on software project success in offshore IT…