"Harvard Education Letter" is published bimonthly at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This issue of "Harvard Education Letter" contains the following articles: (1) Beyond Auto Shop 1: Is Career and Technical Education a Promising Path for High School Reform? (Lucy Hood); (2) The School Readiness Gap:…

"Viewpoints" is a multimedia package containing two audio CDs and a short, informative booklet. This volume of "Viewpoints" focuses on using scientifically based practices to improve student achievement and teacher effectiveness. The audio CDs provide the voices, or viewpoints, of various leaders from the education field who have worked closely…

The Outstanding Schools Act (1993) called upon Missouri's educational community to strengthen expectations and opportunities for students served by Missouri public schools to ensure that graduates of Missouri's public schools have the knowledge, skills, and competencies essential to lead productive, fulfilling, and successful lives. Four major…

The Central Educational Center (CEC) is a unique educational experience worth replicating in Georgia and nationally. It is a bold experiment--offering required academic courses and state-of-the-art technical and occupational courses to high-school students with the opportunity for dual-enrollment college credit while still in high school. Open to…

Online learning through virtual schools is one of the most important advancements in attempting to rethink the effectiveness of education in the United States. The virtual school provides access to online, collaborative and self-paced learning environments--settings that can facilitate 21st Century skills. Today's students must be able to combine…

This publication concentrates on assessments that occur on a day-to-day basis within the science classroom. Such classroom assessments constitute an ongoing process in which teachers and students interact to promote enhanced student learning. This process involves using a variety of assessment strategies and tools to collect information about…

This annual report provides a snapshot of enrollments, student demographics, courses and programs, student achievements, staffing, and funding for community college correctional education programs provided at Washington State Department of Corrections adult facilities. The primary source of information for this document is the State Board for…

This research has been done to find out the factors influencing the students' successes in learning a foreign language (English). In other words, the effects of the methods and techniques, used by the teachers on the staff to teach the chosen foreign language, on the students' success. The main aim of our study is to make the foreign language…

The present study reports results of an experiment with two groups of sophomore students majoring in translation. The control group was taught British culture using in-class instruction only, and the experimental group was taught using a combination of online and in-class instruction. Experimental students used the online course from home as the…

In the 1900s, distance education attempted to mimic the traditional classroom lecture via the transmission of live or "canned" broadcasts, regardless of the technologies used: satellite, television, film, or radio. These kinds of media predisposed distance education (DE) to closely adhere to the lecture (sit and absorb) model, where…

This study used a self-report survey to investigate the sense of classroom community in an online community college classroom. The study also aimed to investigate the relationship between classroom community and academic performance. The author administered a 40-item questionnaire either directly or via the course web site three times during the…

This collection of conference papers includes: "Building a Pedagogical Model for Synchronous Distance Learning Courses" (Panagiotes S. Anastasiades); "Delivery of Courseware using CD-ROM Media" (Brian Brighouse and Denis Edgar-Nevill); "Lessons Learned from Blended Biology Classes" (Arthur L. Buikema, Jr.); "Everything I Ever Needed to Know I…

This collection of articles includes the following: "Second Language Acquisition Research and Applied Linguistics" (Teresa Pica); "'Communicative Lingerings': An Exploratory Study of the Experience of 'Foreign' Communicative Features in the Interactions of American Expatriates after Reentry" (Laura Sicola); "Acquiring…

This proceedings presents 43 papers delivered at the 2001 annual meeting of the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC). Papers in the proceedings include the following: "Act IV: On Being Less Invisible" (Bill Karis); "Building a Community of Professional Communicators by Mapping Needs and Assets"…

A study explored informal learning in relation to online communications and working class people's use of computers as a socially situated practice rooted in collective, communal relationships. It drew on analysis of online learning workshop participation in specially initiated sessions among Canadian labor activist/educators. Findings were based…