This teacher's resource guide capitalizes on the appeal of fantasy literature to children to create activities that address the 12 Standards of the English Language Arts sponsored by National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association. The guide contains practical ideas that enable grade 4-8 teachers or librarians to…

Few individuals have given careful thought to what their lives might be like after they retire. Although some may have considered the financial implications of living on a fixed or limited income, most have not considered the social and emotional impact of leaving work. Career practitioners can play an important role in facilitating the transition…

The Law School Admission Test (LSAT) was examined to see if the items on a form could be divided into different subgroups in which items looked statistically similar within the subgroups but statistically different between subgroups. Of such subgrouping can be detected, it is likely that the subgroups of items measure different abilities, and the…

This book aims to make a genuinely new contribution to the teaching of classic and contemporary literature in high schools--a system of teaching English that achieves classroom control through engagement and interest in content. The questions posed in the book help students build a kind of mental muscle for reading challenging texts and, what is…

This book stems from the idea that literacy learning is the single most significant challenge facing this country and confronting people all over the globe. Chapter 1, "The Meaning of Literacy," explores various interpretations of the word "literacy" as a necessary basis for analyzing and evaluating literary programs. Chapter…

This research, commissioned by the U.S. Department of State, Office of Overseas Schools, was designed to determine the status of environmental education in private U.S. and international elementary schools throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. The study population consisted of all 50 dues-paying member schools in the Association of American…

Noting that picture books can invite students to engage in critical discussion of complex issues of race, class, and gender, this lesson plan helps students to confront the injustice of barriers that separate human beings from one another and to examine the role of prejudice and stereotypes in sustaining these barriers. During the five 45-minute…

For complex educational assessments, there is an increasing use of "item families," which are groups of related items. However, calibration or scoring for such an assessment requires fitting models that take into account the dependence structure inherent among the items that belong to the same item family. C. Glas and W. van der Linden…

This paper presents two articles for parents of children with disabilities. In the first article, "You Are Not Alone," by Patricia McGill Smith, a parent discusses the range of emotions that parents of children with disabilities experience and offers 18 suggestions for coping with the effects of disability on the family. These include:…

Early children's literature plays a major role in the development of attitudes. This annotated bibliography is a compilation of early children's literature that contains positive portrayals of elders. Selected for the bibliography were books that portray aging as a natural and lifelong process of growing and developing, present similarities…

While assessment is the bread and butter of the teaching profession, its practitioners usually do not extend analysis of test responses beyond simple measures such as facility or discrimination indices in classical test theory. Item response theory (IRT) has much to offer but its nonintuitive content and difficulty make it a formidable obstacle in…

A study examined whether students' reading ability affected their level of aesthetic reading response when reading level-appropriate literature. During the study, 28 fifth graders read books and wrote responses to what they read. Responses were scored on a rubric valuing aesthetic responses that demonstrated personal experiences. Students' reading…

The Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) is an integrated set of surveys that has been conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in 1987-88, 1990-91, and 1993-94. In each of those school years, the Census Bureau also conducted a reinterview of the administrators, schools, and teachers. This report…

In fall and winter 1998, a survey was sent to the 162 full-time faculty at Westchester Community College (New York). The survey, which was designed and processed by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at the University of California in Los Angeles, was also conducted on full-time faculty at public two-year colleges throughout the…

A Personal Friends Check List (PFCL) and the NEO Personality Inventory Revised (NEO PI-R) were administrated to samples from 3 nations: Egyptian subjects (n=141; 30 males and 111 females, ages 18-24), Saudi Arabian subjects (n=125; only female subjects ages 18-25); and American subjects (n=108, 30 males and 87 females ages 18 -27). It was assumed…