The University of Virginia's (UVA) Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese created two new hybrid courses for elementary Spanish which supplement 3 hours a week of class time with 2 hours of mandatory, web-based practice activities to respond to a need to make better use of personnel resources at the university. This article reports on the…

Universities are drawn to portals as an effective way of organizing and delivering campus services and information. In a university environment, where the desire for local autonomy and the impetus for centralization are in constant tension, a portal seems especially appealing because it allows local solutions through a shared medium. But the fact…

Based on the premise that teachers gain useful insights by considering what students notice when evaluating a written text, this pilot project reports on the implementation of an evaluative activity with one group of students and considers the implications of the results for classroom practice. Thirteen students in a university-level Spanish…

Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO) is an interdisciplinary moral education program that uses the case study of the Holocaust and World War II to develop middle and high school students' critical thinking abilities, trying to help students make connections between this history and current issues of prejudice, racism, and hatred. In the spring of…

In fall 1994, a joint pilot project was initiated by Pima Community College and the University of Arizona to provide a sequential degree program in bilingual elementary teacher education. This report presents information on project elements and outcomes after the first year. An introduction provides background on the project's development; a…

This document provides an overview of the history, status, and funding of school-to-work programs in Ohio. First, school-to-work transition programs are discussed in the larger context of work force development. Presented next are the rationale for the school-to-work approach to education and its main objectives and components. The differences…

The participatory rural appraisal (PRA) technique was used with 1,550 women and 420 men in more than 100 villages in Uganda, El Salvador, and Bangladesh over a 2-year period to develop and pilot test an approach to literacy education called REFLECT (Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques). The REFLECT approach, which…

This report describes the first 3 years of three Excellent Beginnings projects from 1991 to 1994 funded by the Plan for Social Excellence, a private nonprofit foundation that creates or supports innovative pilot projects in education. Programs that are flexible and responsible to needs of individuals and communities, rather than system-wide…

Collaboration between public schools and universities through implementation of professional development schools may be central to any effort to improve education in an increasingly complex society. Chicago State University (Illinois), in conjunction with a cadre of stake holders from Chicago Public Schools, implemented a professional development…

This paper describes a Goals 2000 project intended to redesign preservice teacher education, practicing teacher roles, and student learning experiences within a Professional Development School framework. The team includes teaching faculty from the University of Akron (Ohio) College of Education Department of Curricular and Instructional Studies,…

School culture has recently emerged as a framework for the study and interpretation of the structure and development of schools. This paper reviews a work culture productivity model and reports the development of a culture instrument. The use of second-order component analysis shows areas of generalization across primary factors. The School Work…

The Toronto Board of Education's "Change Your Future" program started in spring 1991, targeting at-risk students belonging to racial minorities. The interventions took the form of group meetings and individual counseling by the "Change Your Future" counselor. The program took place in the Toronto Board over 2 school years…

Growing interest in adult literacy has encouraged research and innovative programming in the field. This paper examines several pieces of software created by the Institute for the Study of Adult Literacy at Pennsylvania State University and explains their underlying conceptual foundations and the integration of visual materials. The Penn State…

This paper describes the redesign of the goals and objectives of a secondary teacher education program employing authentic assessment. A sophomore level field experience course was identified to run a pilot study of an assessment process that employed video portfolios for evaluation of students' teaching behaviors. The videotapes set the basis…

This document describes an exploratory study done with the purpose of finalizing a formative evaluation instrument for an educational television pilot program for the series "Ziki Zikombot," which is designed to teach basic scientific concepts to children 3- to 7-years-old. For the purposes of the study, it was hypothesized that the more…