This report provides an overview of the research being conducted by the Clinical Studies Group of the Institute for Research on Teaching, whose research is designed to improve the instruction, evaluation, and performance of preservice and inservice reading diagnosticians. The first section of the report describes the use of an inquiry theory of…

A naturalistic inquiry approach was used for the collection and interpretation of information on the 138 schools in the Portland, Oregon school system. This approach was an in-person, field based, investigative method, and was nonobtrusive. Factors studied included: description of the school and its setting; the school building and facilities;…

How do we estimate personal growth? What do experiential education programs accomplish? Personal growth (affective domain) often is fostered through experiential education programs, but it is difficult to measure the relationship between the two. One manner of measurement is the observation of external actions by a student that demonstrate what…

This research investigated the development of interracial interaction patterns among peers in a new open enrollment desegregated middle school. The student interaction analysis conducted for the study attempted to answer the following questions: Is race a significant determinant of the amount of student interaction? Does grade level or sex…

This guide for teachers provides a basic kindergarten curriculum which can be adapted to meet the specific needs of any group of kindergarten children. The guide is divided into major curriculum areas and each area is presented to the teacher through an overview, statement of goals, description of activities, and annotated bibliography. Curriculum…

This study examined cognitive and affective development among children in ten preschool (Head Start) programs in the Boston area that varied in socioeconomic class, racial composition, and cultural emphasis. Data, collected over a two-year period, were compared in an effort to ascertain the effects of socioeconomic status and racism on the…

The purpose of this field study was to test a "macro-model" stemming from earlier research on ability grouping. Dependent process variables such as methods of instruction, and time for school and homework were studied as a function of grouping characteristics of the class. The main data are "macro" in the sense that they refer…

The research project described in this report (Educational Services for Home Day Care Sub-Professionals) examines the education/training needs of a group of women who are licensed home day caregivers and who provide day care services to preschool children for a fee. This project represents an attempt undertaken by an urban university working in…

Forty faculty volunteers from 30 departments were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: "full process," with teaching performance data collection, feedback, diagnosis, applied instructional improvement strategies and data re-collection; "diagnostic," which excluded the applied improvement strategies; and "data collection…

Papers included are: (1) Presidential Address, (2) Challenges to Early Childhood Educators, (3) The Home Start Program in the U.S.A., (4) Early Childhood Training Programs, (5) Initiatives being Taken in Early Childhood Education Field by the Australian Government, (6) Audiovisual Materials for Parents' Discussion Groups, (7) The Role of the Adult…

Analyzes teacher and student conceptions of the meaning of history, exploring factors which shape them, and the relationship among teacher conceptions, the curriculum, and student conceptions. Data collection included interviews and observations. Concludes that teachers should explicitly discuss historical purpose, patterns, generalizability, and…

This issue looks at the different ways in which British providers of postsecondary education can weigh the quality of their provision to inform and shape improvements. The articles aim to provide a feel for current practice in internal evaluation to improve quality and to get providers thinking about some ways in which they can collect and use…

The document is comprised of the Early Language and Literacy Classroom Observation (ELLCO) Toolkit, a field-tested observation packet to examine literacy and language practices and materials in prekindergarten through third grade classrooms, and a user's guide providing technical information and instructions for administration and scoring the…

Could corpus analysis be used to solve some of the problems surrounding non-native speakers' understanding of seemingly synonymous words? This research is needed because there is no single universal unified lexical theory that can be applied to the study of semantics or of language as a whole. Instead, there are a variety of views than can be…

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…