Educators have been challenged for many years to engage their students, but often students still seem to be disengaged (Klem & Connell, 2004). Research indicates student engagement is critical to student achievement and success in school (Appleton, 2008; Connell, Spencer, & Aber, 1994; Easton, 2008; Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris,…

This article examines community-college students' goals within the dominant framing of higher education, in which education serves primarily as preparation for the new economy. Specifically, it explores students' motives for acquiring college credentials and how they apply the principles of utility and efficiency to their pursuit of those…

This paper reports results of intensive field work in urban high school mathematics and science classrooms based on research with students attending eight high schools located in large, disparate urban sites across the U.S. During the course of our observations and interviews we recorded students' activities as well as their impressions of…

Informed by theory and research in inquiry-based classrooms, this paper examines how classroom practices support students' understanding of decimals. Data from a six-month teaching experiment, based on the work of Moss and Case's (1999) use of percentages and metric measure as visible representations for students' emerging understanding of…

In March 1990, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) carried out a study of the potential that technology offers to education at all levels. This project was known as The Vision: TEST (Technologically Enriched Schools of Tomorrow). Data for the study were collected via a review of the applicable literature, visits to schools…

Included in this document are two reports of studies using data from the same l5 research sites in Alberta, Canada. The first study, "Critical Variables in ECS-Grade One Articulation," documented factors associated with successful articulation of Early Childhood Services (ECS) and primary school programs. Data were collected through…

We describe the process of relationship-based intervention and associated changes in children and teachers' relationships and behaviors within center-based child care and examine the circumstances under which changes were most likely to occur. The relationship-based intervention had three components: research partners in each participating…

To provide a description of children's strategies for acquiring and protecting status in peer interactions, participant observation fieldwork was conducted in a classroom of 24 kindergarteners in a low socioeconomic status urban public school. During the period from January through May of 1983, 26 observational visits were made and 80 hours of…