This study compared achievement of students in two types of deliberate learning communities at William Rainey Harper College (Illinois) with achievement of students in two comparative groups. In the "linked classes" format, the same students enrolled in the same two course sections and two faculty members taught in a team format. In the…

Student-centered learning environments provide interactive, complimentary activities that enable individuals to address their unique learning interests and needs, examine content at multiple levels of complexity, and deepen understanding. This paper provides a brief overview of learning environments and identifies the foundations and underlying…

Despite the existence of a college-wide Committee on Access, Equity, and Cultural Diversity and other efforts, minority retention rates at Illinois' Parkland College remained disproportionately low. In 1996, the college received a grant through the Higher Education Cooperation Act to develop an approach to recruit and retain minority students.…

ASQ (Assessing School-Aged Child Care Quality) is a system for determining the quality of school-age child care programs. The ASQ Program Observation Instrument is a ten-step, self assessment process to guide program improvement. This instrument does not work well in full-day programs that have a single focus, but works well in programs that offer…

Although data on sexual harassment in the community college is limited, it is clear that it does exist and that it runs counter to the colleges' educational mission. Sexual harassment has been defined as verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature, imposed on the basis of sex, that denies, limits, or provides different treatment. Recent legal…

The personal computer is the latest educational technology to fall short of its original promise. Although United States public schools now possess 5.8 million computers, roughly one for every nine students, they are not widely used in classroom instruction. This paper argues that the most popular explanations for lack of computer use fix blame on…

This qualitative study investigates the nature of the cognitive processes learners use in HyperCard environments: whether students' cognitive processes differ in learner-controlled versus program-controlled environments, and how much students learn in each. Participants were 20 undergraduate students in the college of education at a large…

The "Safe Schools, Safe Students" conference brought together leading researchers and practitioners in order to share knowledge about innovative safety strategies being used in America's schools. The papers here represent the thinking of scientific experts and school-based pupil service providers who are implementing programs to prevent…

In Canada today, more than a million children spend a large portion of their preschool years in child care outside the immediate family. The design of a child care center's physical facility has a major impact on the quality of interactions that take place within it. Intended to assist design and child care professionals who are building a new…

Whole language, a theory of language instruction that was developed primarily in terms of helping children learn to read, has now been extended to middle- and secondary-school levels. Andragogy, the learning of adults, is a specific theory of adult education, conceived in contradistinction to pedagogy, the teaching of children. When these two…

Providing a low-key, nonthreatening way for teachers and parents to build partnerships for kids, this book presents short, concrete activities in English and Spanish to foster communication between teachers and parents and between parents and children. While the activities in the book are designed for grade 4, none of the activities have…

This paper explores various pedagogical perspectives regarding the use of electronic mail in the classroom as a supplemental and alternative teaching and learning strategy. The paper suggests keeping an electronic journal as a form of writing to clarify and reinforce concepts discussed in class. A brief summary of strategies and assignments are…

Noting that the physical and mental growth of children are influenced by many environmental and familial factors, this paper explores improving the well being of children. The first part of the paper discusses child rearing, emphasizing three fundamental themes: creating an environment where children are born healthy and wanted; helping children…

This research report explores the extent to which the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS) (Harms and Clifford, 1980) remains a valid instrument when used to make cross-national comparisons of quality, and the advantages and disadvantages of using ECERS for this purpose. ECERS was developed to be used by a trained observer to rate the…

Psychologists and educators have struggled to understand the devastating influence of racial intolerance on children, on their personality development, and on their academic growth. The emotional and cognitive elements that underlie racial intolerance, along with its theoretical underpinnings, are examined in this paper. It is believed that five…