Scheduling concerns such as how to keep instructors teaching in the areas for which they are qualified and how to allow for elective offerings in a student's schedule led North Cache Middle School, a year-round education school serving grades 8 and 9 in Richmond, Utah, to explore a number of solutions. Seven solutions are examined along with…

The document describes desirable practices for the education of gifted early adolescents in Virginia. It contains recommendations to assist in implementing a comprehensive plan for gifted middle-grade students compatible with state plans for overall middle school education. Research on students this age and on gifted students is cited to support…

This four-part guide is designed to help community college instructors understand and respond to individual differences in their students. First, the preface lays out a framework for an in-depth examination of individual learning differences by posing the following questions: (1) Is learning a single function or a composite of different types of…

This review summarizes and analyzes the body of research on the characteristics of effective schools in addition to early input-output research, which implied that the determinants of student achievement lay chiefly outside the control of the schools. Chapter 1 discusses patterns in the results of input-output studies, including research…

Fur trade settlements in North America were a fertile environment for cultural education. The fur trade became a network of closely linked social spheres in which individuals had to acquire competence in order to function and survive. The Hudson Bay Company's decision to plant permanent posts on the shores of the Hudson Bay put settlers and their…

A review of the existing literature on preparation of rural teaching personnel focuses on the problems of education and specifically, special education, in rural areas and reports various solutions to those problems. Characteristics of many rural areas (such as high non-enrollment rates, rising service costs, resistance to outside interference,…

To assist in local school improvement, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL) has developed an approach in which teams of local educational leaders are made aware of the results of effective schooling research and are trained in the processes of change and improvement. Research reviews have shown specific elements of schooling at the…

School climate is defined, four instruments used to assess various dimensions of school climate are described, and implications of a school climate profile for developing an individualized staff development program in a rural school setting are discussed. Developed from the professional literature, the definition of school climate includes the…

This paper reports on an inquiry into discipline and effective schools, as perceived by administrators and teachers in a large, midwestern school district. A discussion of the historical foundations in school law, the societal milieu for the study, and educational research into discipline and school effectiveness is followed by a summary of the…

Topic Maps, ISO/IEC 13250 standard, are designed to facilitate the organization and navigation of large collections of information objects by creating meta-level perspectives of their underlying concepts and relationships. The underlying structure of concepts and relations is expressed by domain ontologies. The Topics Maps technology can become…

This speech presents a case for "joining hands" as the educational theme of the 1980s. In "joining hands" with their students, schools need to abandon assembly-line models of instruction in order to adopt learning and teaching styles that nurture students' inner potential and provide for individual differences of both teachers…

Based on observation and experience, analysis translates into a proposal for reform. Eight essays explore in personal terms several troubling educational issues undergirded by the fundamental belief that the purpose of public education is the cultivation of civic virtue. The first essay addresses the widespread loss of faith in public schooling.…

Students (n=358) completing the teacher admissions process at a university in the southeastern United States were asked to rank the characteristics of their best teacher and their worst teacher in grades K-12. They most frequently reported that personal relationships formed between teacher and students greatly influenced the effectiveness of the…

The recent flood of new information on structuring human experience along gender lines and on the female component of human experience has profound implications for education. The new scholarship shows that much of what people once assumed to be innate gender difference is in fact produced by adults' different behavior toward boys and girls, of…

The Freshman General Studies Thematic Program (GST) at California State University, Chico was established in 1973 to create a general education program for freshmen and to give faculty the opportunity to explore innovative teaching methods. What resulted was a 33-unit, year-long interdisciplinary course for 36 well-motivated, well-prepared…