Since the mid-1990s, job-training and employment programs for low-income people have begun to emphasize not only program development and implementation, but also reform of the "system" of labor market, employers, training providers, and helping agencies. In 1995, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which launched the Jobs Initiative in 6…

Recent Australian research provides a solid body of evidence that training investments can yield very high levels of returns for firms across a range of sectors. It highlights these important factors about returns on investment (ROI): ROI come in many forms; immediate ROI are highest when training is highly focused; measuring ROI is not always…

A study to compare vocational education and training (VET) systems examined nine countries across these three large geographical regions: Europe, East Asia, and the Americas. It explored variables that most define and influence characteristics, behavior, and apparent success of VET systems and the impact of change. The nine systems were chosen on…

Vermont's Welfare Restructuring Project (WRP), which was implemented in 1994-2001, required that single-parent welfare recipients who could not find wage-paying jobs after receiving cash assistance for 30 months accept work in subsidized, minimum-wage community service employment (CSE) positions to satisfy their work requirement and improve their…

Reviews current trends in curriculum programing that facilitate the transition of adolescents with handicaps into "everyday" community settings. Traditional curriculum models and instructional strategies have proved to be ineffective; recent models and strategies appear to be more promising. (Author/BJV)

The interdisciplinary general-curriculum project was designed to develop innovative preclinical generalist curricula in ten medical and osteopathic schools and to encourage generalist careers. After two competitive cycles, much has been learned about interdisciplinary collaboration, recruitment and retention of community preceptors, faculty…

Provides brief descriptions of major types of early childhood programs, and reviews what is known about the effects of early childhood programs on children and their families. The authors also consider how those effects come about and why effectiveness varies across programs. Five policy questions and recommendations are discussed regarding how…

This ethnographic study's intent was to understand and interpret elementary teachers' evolving attitudes, perceptions and practices towards non-violence curriculum, the "Second Step" violence-prevention program, and a project model utilizing consultants to implement instruction. Findings included that the curriculum was not implemented as intended…

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act has made a great impact on states' policies in assessing English language learner (ELL) students. The legislation requires states to develop or adopt sound assessments in order to validly measure the ELL students' English language proficiency (ELP), as well as content knowledge and skills. Although states have…

In the future, businesses will demand workers with higher-level skills and more education. Community colleges are key providers of career and technical training as well as traditional academic education. These colleges can also play important roles in the one-stop system created by the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), through which a variety of…

The aim of this five-year longitudinal study was to examine whether 13 Greek precocious readers' performance on a variety of reading, spelling, and phonological-awareness tasks from kindergarten through the fourth grade was different from that of 12 Greek nonprecocious readers and, if there were differences between the two groups' performances,…

Seductive details are highly interesting information tangential to course objectives. The inclusion of seductive details generally harms performance on recall tests, but few studies have used multimedia training or investigated effects on performance on recognition tests or transfer tasks. We conducted two studies using computer-based training,…

Electronic portfolios are a student-centered outcomes-based assessment regime involving learners in the gathering, selection, and organization of artifacts synthesized into a compilation purposed to demonstrate knowledge, skills, and/or achievements supported by reflections that articulate the relevance, credibility, and meaning of the artifacts…

Traditional schools are notorious for being isolated, inflexible, and reluctant to change. This lack of professional dialogue among educators remains a significant barrier to successful school improvement, resulting in teachers' practices becoming stagnant and student achievement suffering. The K20 Center for Educational and Community Renewal at…

In evaluating the success of teacher development programs, valid and scalable measures of teaching practice are needed. We have developed and validated the Science Lesson Plan Analysis Instrument (SLPAI) for quantitative evaluation of teacher-generated multiday lesson plans. This paper presents the SLPAI as a complement to surveys and classroom…