In an exploration of junior high school teachers' meanings of success, it was discovered that teachers tend to talk about their practice in terms of management strategies. Management was clearly significant for teachers as a metaphor for their ways of living, instructing, developing student responsibility, and building community within the fluid…

This study describes the development of the Attitude Toward Grades (ATG) survey instrument, a brief internally consistent measure of college student attitude toward grades and reports on selected behavioral correlates of that attitude. An initial item pool of approximately 50 attitude statements was created and the Thurstone equal appearing…

Noting that school is an influence stronger than any a 5-year-old child has yet known, this parent guide to preparing children to enter school brings together two understandings: first, an understanding of the child at the time school begins and during the first school year; second, an understanding of school, and what goes on inside the…

This technical assistance paper examines the importance of planning the physical preschool environment and its impact on the child's total development. The two main aspects of the physical environment which are discussed in detail are creating areas of interest in the classroom, and planning the outdoor environment. Issues explored in creating…

Suggesting that all students are capable of learning and can achieve high levels of competency when teachers delineate their expectations, this digest focuses on Outcome-Based Education (OBE) in the language arts classroom. The digest delineates some of the tenets of OBE, including the necessity of clearly defined objectives, students having…

In this 2-year collaborative research study, ethnographic and quantitative methodologies were used to explore the nature of professors' classroom teaching contexts and the relationships between classroom actions and student teachers' classroom climate perceptions. Data for case studies of four College of Education professors associated with the…

This packet contains four separate documents designed to help elementary schools develop their own action plans for implementing the KERA (Kentucky Education Reform Act) Primary Program, a developmentally appropriate program for young children supported by the Kentucky Department of Education. Fully implemented primary programs are to include the…

This personal narrative in book form illustrates the frustrations and successes a particular teacher and her seventh- and eighth-grade students faced every day in their classroom laboratory. It shows how the teacher used nontraditional means such as improvised classroom drama, story telling, performing and writing poetry, play writing, engaging in…

Thirty-eight student teachers at a small liberal arts college in northeast New York completed questionnaires requiring them to rank the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with statements about teaching in multicultural classrooms. Results revealed that student teachers approached their teaching methods very flexibly, recognizing that…

Currently, the relationship between second language acquisition (SLA) and foreign language learning (FLL) is unidirectional, with theory and hypotheses flowing from SLA to FLL, and making FLL a subset of SLA. However, this relationship is an artificial one resting on debatable or even incorrect assumptions. These include the assumptions that: (1)…

Noting that when planning a program for 2-year-olds, it is important for the teacher to consider the developmental levels and interests of the children, this book offers teachers a practical guide for working with 2-year-olds in a child care setting. The 15 chapters focus on the following areas: (1) designing a flexible and responsive environment…

This study examined the effects of different types of cooperative learning environments on low, average, and high ability students' perceptions of the middle school science classroom environment. Subjects were 15 teachers and 1,185 students from the sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grades of two middle schools. Data were gathered from a variety of…

As part of a longitudinal examination of the New Zealand junior school (which provides the first 3 years of schooling to New Zealand pupils), a study of organizational patterns in a random selection of schools and of children's school experiences was conducted. Class activities in a sample of junior school classrooms located in seven state…

This longitudinal study examined the relationship of care quality in children's homes and external day care settings to children's emotional expressions and to problem and competence behaviors. Subjects were 123 children (63 males, 60 females) mostly from middle-class Swedish families. When children were 29 months old, data about quality of care…

A program was developed to address the needs of 20 day students with emotional and behavioral disturbances, who had been expelled from other special school programs. A small group format was used to teach and to practice fundamental social skills necessary for coping with the classroom environment. Groups of three children were formed on the basis…