The intent of this survey is to achieve an understanding of the drug using patterns of youngsters in New York's secondary schools. It was initiated to gather in detail the extent and dimensions of alcohol and drug use among a sample of New York students in grades seven through twelve. This survey was conceived as a benchmark study--to establish a…

A project to raise the percentage of student attendance to 95 percent or above was initiated at Brownsville Junior High in Miami, Florida. The school is geographically located in a low socioeconomic area and the students are 80 percent black. The program included the use of community resources and incentives of frisbees, yo-yos, t-shirts,…

This issue of "Insights Into Open Education" investigates various aspects of the problems and potential of mainstreaming handicapped children into the regular school program. Brekke, in an article entitled "How Can Teachers Begin to Meet the Special Needs of Mainstreamed Children in the Regular Classroom?" asserts that teachers must concentrate on…

Second grade classroom protocols collected within this volume are examples of the protocols developed by the ethnographers associated with Special Study A: "An Ethnographic Study of the Forty Classrooms of the Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study." Twenty teachers at both the second and fifth grades were observed for one week by an…

A survey of teachers who had taken a course on behavior problems in the public schools at Florida Technological University was conducted to determine the effectiveness of this particular course. The results of this survey are analyzed and discussed. A questionnaire, formulated in a Likert scale format, was developed to provide information in six…

Presented in this paper is a brief overview of alternative approaches to evaluating teacher performance that includes appraisal based on mutually derived objectives, appraisal based on student learnings, and appraisal based on teacher behavior. Subsequent to this overview is a more indepth review of an approach which integrates the above-mentioned…

This evaluation report is presented at the conclusion of the third year of Project Assist, a program funded under the Emergency School Assistant Act (ESAA). The main focus of the project was on improving student reading and mathematics skills primarily through contact with instructional teacher aides and special supplementary instructional…

The paper describes a systematic observation instrument designed to describe settings in which young children and adults interact. The Early Childhood Setting Observation Instrument (ECSOI) provides a comprehensive matrix of categories useful in describing and analyzing adult-child interactions. Adult behavior categories included in the matrix…

The concepts of the goals and perspectives of organizations and the organization of tasks, which have been valuable in the analysis of industrial work settings, were used to analyze two graduate schools of business that differ on these dimensions. The schools examined were the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and the Northwestern…

The study involved 525 high school biology students and their teachers and was an attempt to determine the effect of teacher attitude toward biology on the students' attitude toward biology. The degree of understanding of science was also analyzed. A 65-item inventory was developed to measure attitude toward biology. The Wisconsin Inventory of…

This report describes a project dealing with the development and implementation of a model for training the interpersonal aspect of competence. The project had four purposes for the student participants: (a) increase the interpersonal competence of students who previously exhibited deficiencies in interpersonal relations; (b) lessen the…

The main purpose of this book is to draw attention to a subject which is, or should be, of concern to virtually every citizen--judges, legislators, school officials, teachers, pupils, and parents. The school is not immune to the "sex revolution" that is going on in society, and is therefore obligated to keep abreast of developments. The main…

The internal evaluator at Marcy Open School has the responsibility for developing support services, such as identifying problems and posing solutions, as part of a formative evaluation effort. The evaluator might alter the use of space and storage of materials in the classroom, suggest that excessive adult interruptions tend to reduce classroom…

The purpose of this study was to validate the Teacher's Assessment of Students' Aptitudes Form (TASAF), an instrument devised to guide teachers assessment of students' aptitudes through the observation of their classroom behaviors, i.e., to what extent were teachers able to detect levels of differential aptitudes in their students through guided…

Length of pauses between quizzes and laboratory assignments in a self-paced psychology-of-adjustment course were examined. Students (n=31) were required to take quizzes from proctors, 15 of which were unit quizzes and five of which were unit review quizzes, and to present five laboratory assignments to the instructor during the course in a…