Since early 1998, AEL, Inc., has been assisting state departments of education in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia in the implementation of the federally funded Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) program. As part of this assistance, AEL established two types of electronic networks to link school staff at CSRD sites,…

This report is an evaluation of the Silver Edition II Project, a program to offer library-centered humanities programming to older adults. In the program local scholars in seven geographically dispersed library systems led discussion groups made up of 20 to 25 participating older adults. This evaluation focuses on the stated goals of the project:…

A study of third-year medical school discussion groups was undertaken to determine how much the cognitive level of instructors' questions in small group sessions influenced student responses and whether these responses had any measureable relationship to critical thinking skills, or National Board of Medical Examiner (NBME) scores. The research…

The potential of on-line discussions to prompt greater reflection of course material is often stymied by a tendency of students to agree with one another rather than to formulate counter-arguments. This article describes an experiment using note starters and elaborated cases to encourage counter-argumentation and examines interactions with…

Civics courses are a source of civic skill development, yet not all American students receive civics instruction. This fact sheet reports evidence on the effect of civic education on the civic skill levels of young people. It uses "average treatment effects" to report the effects of studying various civics topics on civic skills. Civic…

A statistical model is presented for analyzing the results of group conversation tests in English, developed in a Finnish university study from 1977 to 1981. The model is illustrated with the findings from the study. In this study, estimates of percentile curves for the number of errors are of greater interest than the mean regression line. It was…

The purpose of this research was to determine if there is an opportunity for colleges and universities to improve the quality of knowledge constructed in online (asynchronous) discussion boards by optimizing the number of students in the discussion. 93 online graduate students and 36 online faculty were surveyed to gain the perspective from both…

As online professional development courses for teachers have grown, the discussion forum has become a locus of considerable research. This study analyzes the discussion forums in four different sessions of a short (4-week) online course for teachers from six schools in three states. This study also compares four methodologies, all of which have a…