This article highlights a core lesson that has been used in a number of Lincoln Park Zoo educational programs. The lesson teaches students to conduct an ethological, or animal behavior, study on a bird. This study can be implemented in a variety of outdoor settings, including a park, schoolyard, or zoo. Using an ethogram, students will practice…

Schools are complex institutions in which change occurs almost constantly. As each new piece of information is learned, the learner is changed, never to return to the same state they were prior to the act of learning, (Morrison, 2002). This study investigates the impact of interdisciplinary lesson study on teachers' instructional decisions and…

Describes the provenance of the data used in this issue. Includes design of the instructional sequence, instructional activities, classroom structure, and classroom episodes. (Author/MM)

The purpose of the present study was to determine how two different data collection techniques would affect the Q-factors derived from several factor analytic procedures. Faculty members (N=146) from seven middle schools responded to 61 items taken from an instrument designed to measure aspects of an idealized middle school culture; the instrument…

This paper constructs a framework for understanding research partnerships with youth and uses this framework to examine a project in which university researchers collaborated with youth to examine their educational institutions and the contexts of their learning. Adult researchers trained and supervised 21 "youth ethnographers" to carry out…

Nonresponse issues are investigated for the base year (1988) survey of the United States Department of Education's National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88), a national probability sample of middle schools and eighth-grade students in the spring of 1988. The total eighth-grade enrollment for the NELS:88 sample of schools was 203,002;…

This guide, which is one in the "Exploration" series of curriculum guides intended to assist junior high and middle school industrial educators in helping their students explore diverse industrial situations and technologies used in industry, deals with research and development. The following topics are covered in the individual lessons: product…

Genuine educational reform depends on developing relationships with the home, community groups, politicians, and the business community (Seeley, 1981). This report is the third of three volumes that are products of a 3.5 year study of education reform, with a focus on the role of parent, family, and community involvement in the middle grades. The…

The purpose of this project was to investigate, in an informal and exploratory manner, the reactions of middle school students to unfamiliar symbols used as computer screen icons. The project focused on discovering a means to address the following issues: (1) the appearance of buttons containing text compared to those with graphics; (2) the…

Middle school and high school students need to develop many skills in order to investigate environmental issues and know the basics of citizenship action strategies. This student guide is designed to teach students how to investigate and evaluate environmental issues and actions. The guide is presented in six modules. Module 1 introduces the…

A relatively systemic approach to education reform emerged in the 1990s as one way of addressing policy fragmentation. This volume, the last in a set of three, describes the research design of a study that sought to: (1) expand knowledge of state approaches to systemic education reform; (2) examine district, school, and teacher responses to state…

The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is the largest and most ambitious study undertaken by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. Forty-five countries collected data in more than 30 languages. Five grade levels were tested in the two subject areas, so that more than half a million…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…