This document is comprised of the six issues in volume 16 of the Harvard Education Letter, a bimonthly newsletter addressing current issues in elementary and secondary education. Articles in this volume include the following: (1) January-February--"Grade Inflation: What's Really behind All Those A's?" (Birk) and "Every Friday was Fight Day"…

In this lesson, students work in teams, role-playing a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life in rural Africa. Teams focus on four goals: (1) grow more food; (2) develop water resources; (3) improve health services; and (4) protect the environment. Each student team is assigned to one of five regions in Africa. Teams…

This guide, provided by a partisan education policy public interest group, seeks to answer the most frequently asked questions about teaching, designing, and evaluating an English immersion classroom and the research underpinnings in favor of English immersion. This guide aims to help teachers and policymakers better understand what English…

Available in English or Spanish, this resource guide aims to help rural schools and communities learn ways of supporting each other so that both can thrive. Background information and basic tools are provided for starting a joint school-community development effort. Chapters contain: (1) outline of the guide and statement of beliefs about…

This paper describes the research and development of a fully World Wide Web-based credit course in the English Department at the University of Waterloo (Ontario). One hundred students from across Canada complete four exercises in technical writing over a four-month term. In the process, they learn to understand and apply the principles of SGML…

This book presents performance-based projects to provide elementary school students both the structure and the freedom to become actively engaged in their own learning. The approach is based on the concept of authentic learning, which advocates a relevant, real world experience to personally engage students in learning. The book is divided into…

This study was conducted to identify the personality characteristics of high achieving developmental, or remedial, students and to discover how personality characteristics relate to academic performance among high-achieving developmental and non-developmental college students to determine if a correlation exists between personality and…

A teacher of English in China describes his experiences teaching the listening component of a summer course designed to help 37 doctoral students improve their English skills before beginning an agricultural economics program. In the listening component, students were to gain experience in notetaking while listening to extended academic lectures.…

These six theme-oriented newsletter issues present specific curriculum planning ideas and activities for teachers of young children. The theme of the January-February 1997 issue is "The Arts of Winter." Topics in this issue include celebrating with music and movement, learning songs, classroom visitors and the arts, art in picture books,…

This theme issue of "Bildung und Wissenschaft" explains the importance of multilingualism in today's world, focusing on foreign language instruction in Germany. It examines the following issues: "Multilingualism in a Changing World"; "The Significance of Foreign Languages for Germany"; "Foreign Languages in…

The 1998 revision of the "Information Power" guidelines focuses on building partnerships for greater student learning. While not a radical departure from the previous edition, the recent document emphasizes both greater collaboration and leadership and increased involvement with the technologies of information and learning. This study…

A study explored the language use patterns, motivations and attitudes toward Americans or the British in the formal English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classroom, changes in orientations and motivations, and instructional preferences of limited-English-proficient Korean high school students. Subjects were 40 male and 40 female students randomly…

This case study describes how one autistic learner, an 11-year-old boy, became a co-researcher with university literacy instructors to investigate how hypermedia can help him develop language and literacy skills. Data was collected for one year from video taping, journal notes, interviews with teachers and parents, test scores, and student…

One of the ways in which language testing interfaces with applied linguistics is in the definition and validation of the constructs that underlie language tests. When language testers and score users interpret scores on a test, they do so by implicit and explicit reference to the construct on which the test is based. Equally, when applied to new…

This paper seeks to build on the growing body of literature demonstrating the value of a dialogical process in second language learning, especially in work with students who are not part of the dominant cultural or linguistic group. It identifies and describes the ways in which bilingual secondary students engaged in dialogical processes begin to…