Problems of urban high schools, including poor attendance, high dropout rates, low achievement, and poor social relationships, are linked together by a strong sense of alienation among students and teachers. Yet much of the educational research and policy treat these issues separately. In this study a conceptual framework for understanding student…

Impressionistic accounts of contemporary student behavior. (JH)

Belonging matters to adolescents. PSI Associates, a private consortium of psychologists, educators, and prevention specialists, has developed several prevention/intervention programs, including Positive Peer Groups, which has disengaged teens working alongside successful students on high-profile service projects. PSI's Teens Resisting Violence…

Evaluated the effects of involvement of adolescents in community service activities on levels of alienation in 50 ninth graders. It is suggested that adolescent involvement in service activities can produce positive benefits, including reduced levels of alienation, improved school behavior, improved grade point average, and acceptance by the adult…

The major goals of this study are to identify dimensions of bureaucracy and alienation, to determine the relationship of these dimensions to second-order, or integrating, factors, and to determine the relationships between the integrating factors of bureaucratic structure and alienation. (Author)

Discipline is viewed in its broad organizational context as control of behavior. The context of secondary school discipline is analyzed in both its theoretical and practical aspects. Available from: Australian College of Education, 916 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia, $2.50 single copy. (Author/MLF)

Investigates whether students' engagement with or alienation from instruction determines (1) the extent to which students take advantage of classroom opportunities to learn and (2) their learning outcomes. Demonstrates that the gaps between opportunities to learn and students' appropriation of those opportunities are instructionally produced and…

Differences in the behavior of those students who choose the school they will attend and those students compelled to attend a certain school by their parents are examined. For journal availability see SO 504 329. (DE)

Results are reported from a study that examined the relationship between academic dishonesty and contextual and social alienation among public and private school ninth through twelfth graders (N=1,534). Cheating was more prevalent among private school White males and among students who exhibited a high level of contextual alienation. (IAH)

Suggests how school administrators can deal with irreverent, arrogant students, as well as with their parents and supportive faculty members. (JG)

Surveys of secondary school students to determine their reasons for alienation from physical education indicated 21 percent felt alienated and did not enjoy gym class; half of the alienated students were also alienated from school overall; nearly three-quarters were average or below average in physical skill. A model is presented to help explain…

Describes how categories from the curriculum can play a central role in the interactional construction of students' identities. Follows one adolescent who came to enact the identity of disruptive outcast in the classroom. Argues this development was facilitated by discussion of a curricular theme. (CAJ)

This paper on at-risk deaf adolescents discusses the social impact of school dropouts, causal and behavioral characteristics of at-risk persons, groups that tend to be affected, issues facing deaf adolescents including parent-child conflicts, the role of schools in addressing student alienation and motivation, and intervention recommendations.…

FOCUS is an alternative school program for alienated high school students, designed to prevent them from dropping out. The key components of the program are discussed. (KC)

Resistance theory draws attention to the existence of conflict and antagonism in schools and in pupils' resistance to schools' authority and ideology. In "Learning to Labor," Paul Willis unduly romanticizes resistant practices by the subjects of his ethnography. An alternative view of resistance permits a more socially and historically…