The School District Data Book (SDDB) of the National Center for Education Statistics contains data on local education agencies that make it possible to compare data aggregated at district, county, state, and national levels on hundreds of variables. The development of the SDDB has provided an efficient and powerful tool for use in planning and…

A study used focus groups and interviews to examine dropout causes among Hispanic middle and high school students in Hillsborough County, Florida. Major contributors to Latino student success included personal motivation to succeed, supportive parents, and being interested and involved in school activities. Factors contributing to dropout included…

Papers in these volumes were presented at a Mexican conference on linguistics. Most papers are in Spanish; the English translations of the titles include the following: "Directions in Contemporary Semantics" (L. Lara); "Regular Accentuation in Spanish" (C. Braithwaite); "Syntactic Order in Sonoran" (D. Brown); "Speech Datives or Interest/Not of…

This action research project sought to develop students' critical thinking skills by implementing a variety of instructional strategies. Targeted for this study were students in one early childhood special education program, one kindergarten class, and one eighth grade science class. The deficit in critical thinking and problem-solving skills was…

An instructor and her students used questions to plan, teach, and assess a lesson in a Family Literacy/General Educational Development (GED) program. The class identified that their families should lose weight and exercise more to have healthier hearts. They focused on the area of responsibility, called Promote Family Members' Growth and…

In 2000, a quantitative telephone survey of 2,098 businesses in Australia determined employer awareness of and participation in structured workplace learning (SWL) programs. It explored "drivers" of participation and employers' decision-making process. Comparisons with a 1998 survey identified changes in employer awareness, attitudes,…

A comparative study of early school leaving in India, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States found that in spite of huge cultural and economic differences between these countries, there were common underlying causes of the school dropout problem. Economic need, sociocultural divisions, curricula that were unrelated to future work and…

Noting the need to support Western teachers in Australia in their quest to work with indigenous children in more culturally appropriate ways to close the literacy gap between indigenous and non-indigenous children, the Building Bridges project aimed to identify and record the key features of growing up as an indigenous child in Australia today.…

In this research study, the type and nature of reading instruction provided for talented readers was investigated through use of in-depth qualitative comparative case studies. A team of researchers conducted multiple observations in 12 different third and seventh grade reading classrooms in both urban and suburban school districts over a 9-month…

New science shows that exposure to toxins prenatally or early in life can have a devastating and lifelong effect on the developing architecture of the brain. Exposures to many chemicals have much more severe consequences for embryos, fetuses, and young children, whose brains are still developing, than for adults. Substances that can have a truly…

Response to Intervention (RtI) is the practice of providing high-quality instruction and interventions to meet student needs and monitor progress in order to ensure effectiveness of instruction and/or interventions. RtI is an integrated service delivery approach for all students and should be applied to decisions in general, remedial, and special…

This appendix is a companion document to "Saudi Arabia's Curriculum of Intolerance with Excerpts from Saudi Ministry of Education Textbooks for Islamic Studies." The appendix includes selected excerpts in Arabic with English translations for currently-used textbooks in grades 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12. These excerpts support the…

Despite the extensive work that has been done and continues to take place in the field of literacy in Nepal, it was not until very recently that literacy activity in Nepal was reflected in writing. Increasingly, however, literacy practitioners in Nepal are realizing the importance of documenting their experiences, and literature devoted to the…

This collection of articles on second language learning includes: "Action, langage et discours. Les fondements d'une psychologie du langage" ("Action, Language, and Discourse. Foundations of a Psychology of Language") (Jean-Paul Bronckart); "Contextes socio-culturels et appropriation des languages secondes: l'apprentissage en milieu social et la…

This collection of articles on second language learning in a multilingual environment includes: "Franzosisch-Deutsch: Zweisprachiges Lernen au der Sekundarstufe 1" (French-German: Learning Two Languages at Secondary School, Level 1) (Otto Stern, Brigit Eriksson, Christine Le Pape, Hans Reutener, Cecilia Serra Oesch); "Das Projekt…