This article is based on the findings of a broader research project entitled "Childhood Participation and Citizenship Building," which examined the medium-term effects of intense experiences of participation in childhood within both the school environment and those of leisure-time and community education. The results presented in this…

Paraprofessionals and school volunteers increase the number of youth who receive academic and mental health interventions by providing services that were traditionally reserved for professional staff. However, the promise of these low-cost, high-volume non-professional services is tempered by the lack of experimental evidence documenting their…

American colleges and universities have an expanding role to play in nurturing political engagement as more youth attend college. Given low voter turnout among college students yet growing experimental evidence that face-to-face mobilization can boost turnout, the experiment reported in this article examined the impact of a face-to-face college…

Teachers' curriculum ownership is increasingly gaining attention in many countries. It is particularly important that under the conditions of centralized curriculum-making, teachers as final implementers of curricular ideas identify themselves with these ideas. This study investigates Estonian upper secondary school teachers' views on the impact…

Collaboration among educators is a vital component for teachers' success working with diverse students. Teacher preparation programs, however, have not sufficiently included experiences in which teacher candidates can learn about professional collaboration in preparation for clinical and professional experiences. In this article, the authors…

Improving children's attendance is a high priority for Head Start and other early childhood education programs serving low-income children. We conducted a randomized control trial in a major northern city to evaluate the impact of a low-cost intervention designed to promote parents' social capital as a potential influence on children's attendance…

The purpose of this mixed-methods study was: (1) to document the design and implementation process of an online video-based pre-arrival course that was intended to cultivate Asian students' willingness to communicate in American Classrooms; (2) to assess the effectiveness of the course by measuring students' oral proficiency and willingness to…

This article explores the relationship between a formal media educational encounter in the UK and the broad objectives for media and information literacy education circulating in mainland Europe and the US. A pilot study, developed with a special interest group of the United Kingdom Literacy Association, applied a three-part methodology for…

An activity for eliciting student involvement in collaborative decision-making and problem-solving with adults--the student listening circle workshop--is examined for the first time through an experimental study of its effects on participating students. A student listening circle is a facilitated focus group in which students articulate to adults…

Children today face increasingly high stress levels, impacting their well-being. Schools can play a crucial role in teaching social and emotional skills; therefore there is a need to identify effective interventions. This mixed-methods study of 124 elementary school students from three New Zealand schools aimed to (1) assess if children…

The Evidence-based Literacy Support-"Literacy Octopus" Trial tested a range of dissemination interventions and resources, all of which aimed to engage schools in using evidence-based materials to improve teaching and learning in Key Stage 2 literacy. Four delivery partners provided interventions. These included light-touch,…

We report on the scaling up of a high school content literacy framework, Reading Apprenticeship, over a period of four years as part of the independent evaluation of an Investing in Innovation grant from the U.S. Department of Education to WestEd's Strategic Literacy Institute (SLI). Our goal was to understand the school processes that support…

This paper surveys the consequences of pupils' participation in the extra-curricular environmental education (EE) programme Club P.A.N. (Peoples, Animals and Nature) by monitoring changes in their respective knowledge as well as in their environmental attitudes. The programme was conducted in Côte d'Ivoire in West Africa with the help of the local…

P.E. classes are often the only opportunity for inner-city youth to engage in physical activity, but budget cuts and pressure to perform well on standardized tests has made P.E. an afterthought for many school administrators. This study evaluated the effectiveness of a new P.E. curriculum in five Los Angeles inner-city schools. Interviews were…

Web 2.0 technologies characterised by user participation and sharing have been used increasingly in academic environments. In such learning environments, it is critical to engage learners as active participants rather than passive consumers of online content. The present study attempts to conceptualise the participation issue central to blogs…