Youth with and at-risk for emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) served in alternative education settings often experience challenges with writing due to various deficits across academic, behavioral, and social-emotional domains, especially in the area of writing. These youth also are less likely to engage in self-determination skills such as…

Prisoner education represents a deliberate attempt to disrupt the prison by empowering, rehabilitating, and educating prisoners. Studies have consistently shown that prisoner education reduces rates of recidivism, making prisons safer and enabling prisoners to reintegrate more easily into, and contribute to, their communities. This study draws…

This article introduces an innovative model of social work course development, teaching, and implementation. Using the principles of antioppressive education and community-engaged learning, the authors (a former student and faculty member) codeveloped and subsequently taught a course that explored writing, voice, social justice, and the…

This study analyzes the effectiveness of Bibliodidactics--a teaching method for reading incorporating narrative therapy, subtext, storytelling, and bibliotherapy through cognitive processing of emotions--on reading levels of nonnative illiterate or poor-reading prisoners.

This study employed an adapted alternating treatments single-case design to explore students' learning of biology content when using a general note-taking (GNT) strategy and a content-specific graphic organizer (CGO) to support reading high school biology texts. The 4 focal participants were 15-18-year-olds committed to a moderate risk juvenile…

In 2009, there were approximately 137,000 court-involved minor children in residential detention and rehabilitation facilities in the United States as a result of committing a crime. Most of these children have no opportunity to participate in music education while serving long-term sentences in residential lockdown. A program in Austin, Texas,…

This paper draws on three different research projects to demonstrate the use of an expanded model of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), developed as part of a doctoral research study. The first project is an evaluation of the impacts of a Music Partnership Project within Primary and Secondary schools. The second project is an evaluation…

HIV/AIDS infections are growing at an alarming rate for young adults. In 2009, youth, ages 13-29, accounted for 39% of all new HIV infections in the U.S. (Division of HIV/ AIDS Prevention, Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 2011). South Carolina ranks eighth in the nation for new HIV cases, while the capital city of Columbia ranks seventh…

This article examines relationships among process, product, and playmaking in a southeastern playwriting and performance program for teen girls, Playmaking for Girls (PFG). The authors have chosen to focus on tensions between process and product. Such tensions are present in the challenges teachers experience when privileging student-centered…

This study examines qualitative and quantitative data from a fifteen-week experiential course held in a county jail. The course was modeled after the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, and included college students and people who were incarcerated at the time. Survey data and comments gleaned from student papers were used to assess the impact of…

The purpose of this research was to evaluate the impact of a word study literacy approach on the spelling ability and self-efficacy of adults in a county jail. Forty-four inmates participated in the word study intervention that provided them with hands-on learning. The word study intervention was conducted in four separate sessions (September,…

Exemplary Middle Grades Research: Evidence-Based Studies Linking Theory to Practice features research published throughout 2009 in MGRJ that has been identified by the Information Age Publishing's review board as the most useful in terms of assisting educators with making practical applications from evidence-based studies to classroom and school…

The effectiveness of a prescriptive teaching program on the reading, arithmetic, and linguistic development of 35 institutionalized mentally retarded children (mean age 12 years) was investigated. A prescriptive, precision teaching approach was used, along with positive reinforcement in the curriculum areas of reading, mathematical computations,…

Part of a 3-year study of the Chapter 1 Neglected or Delinquent (Chapter 1 N or D) Program, which provides compensatory education services to youth in state-operated juvenile and adult correctional facilities, this report presents descriptive findings in the following five areas: (1) characteristics of youth; (2) correctional education; (3)…

Part of a 3-year study of the Chapter 1 Neglected or Delinquent (Chapter 1 N or D) Program providing compensatory education services to youths in state-operated juvenile and adult correctional facilities, this report presents case studies of nine facilities that have developed particularly effective programs. The study used teacher questionnaires,…