Thirty-three undergraduate and graduate students with learning disabilities (LD), aged 16-56, from five colleges and universities who participated in focus groups identified five beneficial services, skills, and accommodations beneficial to LD students: coursework accommodations; testing accommodations; LD staff; peer support groups; tutors. Other…

Describes a school-university collaboration that developed alternative teaching strategies for motivating inner-city, African-American middle school students (effort-based grading, multiple performance opportunities, increased student responsibility/choice, and validation of cultural differences). Observations, teacher journals, and student…

Describes an interdisciplinary survival project that piques middle school students' imaginations as it tests their problem solving and critical thinking skills in a survival setting. The futuristic time travel project integrates subject areas and fosters skills in communication, cooperation, and group decision making. (SM)

Examines the similarities between high-quality, fully implemented Montessori programs and other developmentally appropriate programs for young children. Focuses on the Montessori philosophy, human relations within the learning environment, the curriculum, areas of the Montessori classroom, relations between home and program, and the developmental…

Examines one community's efforts to fundamentally alter a high school's structure, curriculum, and instructional practices to provide greater educational opportunities for all students. The program used heterogeneous grouping in tandem with curricular and pedagogical changes. Student surveys indicated that the program was moderately successful in…

This article discusses the school engagement literature and offers a conceptual framework with the intention of developing a common terminology to more efficiently organize research and practice. Three distinct perspectives are outlined in relation to school engagement: psychological, educational, and developmental. Four main contexts of…

Many graduate and professional programs include Problem Based Learning (PBL) as a mainstay in their curricula. For many undergraduate students, this is a change from a teacher-centered to a student-centered learning method. This study was undertaken to learn about perceptions and test performances of college students (N=116) enrolled in liberal…

Today information about the world around people comes to them not only through words on a piece of paper, but more and more through the powerful images and sounds of their multimedia culture. This explosion in information has presented a major challenge to the world of formal education. The transformation of their culture from an industrial age to…

This paper describes a method in oral fluency evaluation for Tourism English according to a corpus-based lexical approach. Our main research focus is placed on measuring oral skill competence among Tourism English (TE) learners by contrasting their word use and linguistic fluency, achieved in two types of oral tasks, with corpus data frequencies.…

School and government officials, system administrators and other policymakers offer a variety of reasons for engaging in high stakes testing: to monitor student performance, to measure teacher and/or school effectiveness, to ensure accountability, etc. Some of these reasons are good; others not. But the best reason--one that is never offered,…

This article considers the research literature of the past decade pertaining to the use of computers in early childhood education. It notes that there have been considerable changes in all aspects of our lives over this time period and considers studies in which information and communication technologies (ICT)and in particular, computers, have…

New software tools for data analysis provide rich opportunities for representing and understanding data. However, little research has been done on how learners use these tools to think about data, nor how that affects teaching. This paper describes several ways that learners use new software tools to deal with variability in analyzing data,…

Organizational innovation is a difficult process. Most innovations fail. If an innovation fails there is a high probability the organization will be fractured. It is easy to break apart an organization. It is much more difficult to build it back up. This is a case study of an innovation in a branch of a large private English language school in…

The advance of online technology and instructional delivery such as Web-based learning (WBL) has heralded new changes in education. Students using the WBL environment in various courses at eight universities in Malaysia were surveyed. Results showed that five main factors influence the effectiveness of the online learning process: students'…

The author of this article challenges a common assumption made by both critics and defenders of standardized-testing technology (or psychometry), namely that standardized tests "measure" something (culture, ability, etc.). It argues that psychometric practice cannot be classified as a form of measurement and instead is best understood as…