This paper assesses how French and English elementary school teachers have responded to broad, radical educational policy changes affecting individual teachers and schools. The paper uses findings from two linked studies, the Primary Assessment Curriculum and Experience (PACE) project in England and the Primary Teachers and Policy Change (STEP)…

For educators, a thorough understanding of adolescents' concepts of caring is critical. This paper reports on how early adolescents themselves view the concept of caring. A fundamental issue relating to caring is whether it is primarily innate or learned. This study, which involved observing and interviewing students, was conducted in two middle…

A study examined the language and interactions that occurred in classes where teachers felt they were providing an environment that fostered reasoning about their coursework. The discourse within the diverse classrooms of eight high school teachers (two each in American literature, American history, biology, and physics) was examined. In each…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of a computer-generated feedback system when used in conjunction with an analysis of videotaped performances of students' speeches and model speeches. Subjects, 112 university students enrolled in 9 sections of a required undergraduate public speaking course, were randomly assigned to 1…

Distance educators must become more connected with and responsive to their students by developing their understanding of how unity, diversity, and interdependence operate in learners' environments. Many of the holistic strategies for promoting connectedness with female distance learners in particular have strong links to existing feminist…

This report describes what has been learned from three surveys about undergraduate academic dishonesty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The surveys involved 891 undergraduates, approximately 490 faculty, and 481 graduate teaching assistants. Cheating was examined as a literal reality rather than as an abstract concept.…

Ontario's Transition Years initiatives, designed to change schooling structures and processes and ease early adolescents' transition to high school, seem to place teachers in equally trying and traumatic transitions in their work and careers. Program components challenge teachers' sense of competence and effectiveness and threaten to consume…

A study examined the reactions and responses of new and veteran teachers throughout a full semester graduate in-service course which introduced whole language theory through experiential learning. The 30 K-8 teachers in the course came from 7 schools of a large inner-city school district where 70% of the students lived below the poverty level.…

A study examined the questioning behavior of teachers following the reading of a basal reader story. The four teachers who served as subjects were chosen from a pool of 18 fourth grade teachers, and were selected because their classes produced the two highest and two lowest mean scores on a standardized reading comprehension measure. Each…

Since the late 1960's, researchers have been concerned with the influence of teacher expectations on student performance. Teacher expectations generally can be categorized into three types: assessments of ability, predictions of progress, and natural discrepancies between teacher estimates and actual student performance. Expectations can have the…

Bias based on race, ethnicity, sex, color, class, or other characteristics is a problem nationally and internationally. Both overt and covert incidences occur in educational settings where most educators begin to work with little or no practical experience with the cultural groups they encounter in the student population. Thus the behaviors of…

This study was conducted to address the question of how teacher written comments affected students from elementary school to college and to see if there were any differences within and between these groups. Twelve students, five male and seven female, from elementary, high school, and college (including some education majors), were the subjects of…

This study examined the effectiveness of audiocuing as a method for training a student teacher in the skill of providing positive reinforcement to students. (Audiocuing is the pre-recorded auditory cue provided by a microcassette recording which only the subject can hear.) In the event that it is necessary for the student teacher to make…

A cross-cultural framework was applied to the results of the Young Scholars Project in Marine Science, a 4-week workshop for 14 hearing impaired adolescents (aged 13 to 19 years) that was funded by the National Science Foundation. Eight of the students were preparing to enter the eighth or ninth grade in high school and the other six were…

As personality and social psychology research has shown, cross-situational consistency of people's social behavior tends to be rather low. This applies also to teachers' classroom behavior: teachers adapt to situative conditions. However, both situation specificity and teachers' adaptation are not sufficiently taken into account in research and in…