Coordination among stakeholders has been considered as a significant influential factor in providing teachers with quality Professional Development (PD) opportunities. The importance of coordination intensifies when a variety of PD providers work on the capacity building of teachers in the same region such as in some rural areas of Pakistan. The…

The centennial volume of "Review of Research in Education" ("RRE") takes a "retrospective, prospective" approach on a diverse range of education research topics spanning the last 100 years. While using historical trends as foundations for their chapters, the authors also look ahead to the most challenging issues and…

Educational achievement in rural America is one of the country's great overlooked challenges. Rural students achieve below the U.S. average on national tests, and high school dropout rates are higher and college attendance lower than they are in cities and suburbs. When the U.S. Department of Education asks low-achieving schools to be turned…

Understanding human activity in real-world situations often involves complicated data collection, analysis, and presentation methods. This article discusses how Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) can inform design-based research practices that focus on understanding activity in real-world situations. I provide a sample data set with…

Long-term centralization of Thailand's Adult Education Division resulted in a preponderance of urban-oriented curriculum in a country that was 80 percent rural. Beginning in 1976, the World Bank-Thai government's Nonformal Education Development Project facilitated decentralization by sharply increasing rural staff, offering new career…

Between 2001 and 2005, the state of Maine shifted the focus of its statewide high school improvement efforts to include an explicit focus on adolescent literacy. One trigger for that change in focus was a 5-school adolescent literacy initiative previously launched in a rural county under the federal Northeast and Islands Regional Educational…

Case studies of five small and isolated rural schools in the south-central United States examined their participation and success in the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) program. The schools included three elementary schools and two K-12 unit schools serving 71-473 students. All were at least 50 miles from a metropolitan area and…

This guide, intended to help rural educators improve their school or district, connects general knowledge about educational change efforts and knowledge about conditions and characteristics specific to rural education. Chapter 1 discusses common strengths and weaknesses of rural schools and describes values and social patterns in small schools and…

Describes the evolution of a phonics-basal elementary reading program in a rural New Mexico school district and the resulting improvement in reading. Notes the conditions in which changes initiated by the district and the Follow Through sponsor occurred. Explains monitoring and evaluation advances. (SB)

In rural China, the reform movement's goal was to universalize basic education by making education more compatible with local needs. This meant decentralizing school authority to increase local governments' involvement in school administration and revising curriculum content to increase schools' relevancy to specific communities' future economic…

This paper reports on the concerns of rural school superintendents in Texas regarding the inclusion of special needs students in regular classrooms. The Change Facilitator Stages of Concerns Questionnaire (CFSoCQ) and a demographic data sheet were completed by 484 of the 708 rural superintendents in Texas. The CFSoCQ consists of 35 items…

Since independence, Sierra Leone has struggled with an inherited colonial educational system that is dysfunctional and irrelevant to the needs of a largely rural population. In an effort to remedy this situation, the Bunumbu Project, sponsored by UNESCO and other international aid organizations, was begun in 1974. Involving Bunumbu Teacher's…

The successful computer program in rural Hillsboro-Deering (New Hampshire) Cooperative School District was the result of a program of excellence in education adopted by a completely new and inexperienced school board in 1978. Supported both by oldtimers and by newcomers, the board acquired new administrators, purged the faculty, and acquired…

Since 1975 the Contoocook Valley District, a small rural cooperative school district in southwestern New Hampshire, has developed a performance-based student competency program which has resulted in a dramatic increase in scores on the Stanford Achievement Test. The district is comprised of 9 towns, covers an area of almost 300 square miles, and…

Change in rural schools is difficult to achieve because the diversity of these schools does not allow for one set implementation program. Small rural schools are an integral part of the rural community, and as such are as different as the part of the country where they are located. Change in rural areas is unsuccessful due to: the amount of…