Charter school administrators weathered start-up woes, among them challenging students with unmet needs, verbal assaults, dwindling student enrollment, and a first-year budget deficit exceeding $200,000 to implement a reading improvement strategy that holds promise for helping at-risk students read better, a point particularly underscored…

Challenges in adapting Japanese Lesson Study for an American context have included teachers' limited prior experience with action research and facilitation as well as a mismatch between American curricula and the time requirements of the traditional Japanese Lesson Study model. Lesson Link[R] adapts Japanese Lesson Study for American contexts and…

For years, environmental educators have been arguing that the culture of schooling (mostly focused on cultural reproduction) is antithetical to environmental education. Within this context, it is often suggested that environmental education occurs when there is a particularly passionate and motivated teacher who, despite frequent barriers,…

This article describes the process evaluation of a stress management program called "Learn Young, Learn Fair" for 5th and 6th graders. Studies, reviews and meta-analyses of prevention programs report that a common limitation in studies is the restricted documentation of process factors that contribute to the success of interventions. Program…

The research design for this study focuses on examining the core issues and challenges when video games are used in the classroom. For this purpose three naturalistic contexts in Turkey were examined in which educational video games were used as the basis for teaching units on world continents and countries, first aid, and basic computer hardware…

Project Early Kindergarten (PEK) aims to improve the school-readiness of Saint Paul children and help close the achievement gap through offering high-quality educational experiences for preschool children. This report comes at the conclusion of the sixth year of PEK. Following an initial planning year (2004-05), PEK has served children through the…

The Rural and Low-Income School (RLIS) program is part of the Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP) that was authorized under Title VI, Part B of the "Elementary and Secondary Act of 1965" ("ESEA"), as amended by the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" ("NCLB"). The RLIS program provides additional funds…

This report presents findings from the Massachusetts Family Child Care study, a two-year evaluation designed to examine the impacts on providers and children of an early childhood education program aimed at improving the development and learning opportunities in the care settings and, as a consequence, the outcomes for children in care. The early…

Society still carries the lingering remains of the autocratic cultural mores of reward and punishment. Staff in a group home setting for children must be aware of the complexity caused by the mingling of autocratic and democratic mores. This phenomenon causes discrepancy in parenting methods. It was surmised that training the staff (N=4) at one…

An introductory section providing background information on the Virginia Department of Education's (VaDOE) pilot education project for 4-year-olds is followed by discussion of the project and its evaluation. Discussion also concerns the forms of collaboration that are likely to increase the use of data by three classes of information users,…

The need for specific information about principals as change facilitators prompted a long-range research program. A first step in this effort investigates the interventions principals make in relation to the implementation of an innovation in their schools. Subjects were 10 principals of elementary schools where an identifiable innovation…

Researchers have only recently recognized that assertions by various educators that they have implemented educational innovations do not all mean the same thing or bear the same weight, according to the authors of this report. Efforts made by the Research and Development Center for Teacher Education at the University of Texas at Austin to…

To gather descriptive data regarding basic characteristics of existing standardized programs and to determine the extent to which the programs have been adopted and replicated following their initial development, a questionnaire was designed and sent to the developers of 20 standardized behavior intervention programs serving normal and moderately…

The article reports results of a study on the Adaptive Learning Environment designed to integrate moderately handicapped students in regular classes on a full-time basis. Data supported the ALEM as a feasible and effective approach and identified significant reading and math achievement gains for regular and special education students. (CL)

The School Improvement Project of the Institute for the Development of Educational Activities, first instituted in 1980, offers high schools a method for selecting and implementing recommended changes from among the many proposed in recent reports on high school improvement. (JBM)