Praise is better than punishment as a motivator for children, but both are manipulative and often backfire. Real encouragement comes in the form of honest, caring concern without strings attached. The paper presents examples of how to encourage children successfully. (SM)

"The Achiever" is published semi-monthly during the school year for parents and community leaders. Each issue contains news and information about school improvement in the United States. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) "Spellings: Reward Teachers Who Get Results"; (2) "'Growing Pains' Won't Sidetrack…

This article reviews the impact of learning disabilities on self-esteem, discussing: how self-esteem develops, how it suffers when learning disabilities are present, and how to contribute to a learning-disabled child's self-esteem by helping the child feel more capable, more significant, more powerful, and more worthy. (Author/JDD)

A large and growing body of research supports the critical relationship between early childhood experiences and successful life-long outcomes. Assessing the readiness of children as they enter school is a high priority. This report describes findings from Year Two of the assessment of school readiness with a larger random sample of children…

The relationship among preadmission characteristics of students, admission policies, and different measures of success during college was studied at nine colleges: Bucknell University, Colgate University, Hartwick College, Kalamazoo College, Kenyon College, Occidental College, Ohio Wesleyan University, University of Richmond, and Williams College.…