While evaluation conditions made little difference in the quality of the fourth graders' drawings, their effect on continuing motivation was significant. The threat of grades and peer comparisons was detrimental to continuing motivations. Students who evaluated their own performance were the most motivated. (Author/RM)

Children with language deficiencies in grades two through four received instruction in listening comprehension. One-half of the children in each grade verbalized explicit strategies prior to applying them to questions. Strategy self-verbalization led to high self-efficacy across grades and promoted performance among third and fourth graders.…

Reviews the history and conclusions of school effectiveness research, which focuses on student achievement, and of school improvement research, which emphasizes educational innovation per se; analyzes the methodologies of these two lines of inquiry. Distills from both bodies of literature seven school characteristics that constitute excellence.…

Research increasingly points to the relationship between effective leadership and increased student achievement. But just what constitutes effective leadership-and how to best support school leaders-has been a matter of both study and speculation. This policy brief draws on McREL's leadership research and an analysis of the needs in McREL's…

An important federal statute impacting student records is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), enacted to ensure student/parent access to education records and to limit disclosures to others for unauthorized purposes. FERPA Regulations set forth the basic federal records retention and destruction requirements. The records of…

This book is for teachers and teaching assistants (TAs) seeking to improve the ways that they work together to meet the needs of children in their classes. The number of teaching assistants (including learning support assistants who support children with special educational needs) has expanded greatly in recent years, a trend which is set to…

The study reported in this paper builds on a broader work aiming to identify factors that affect the development of prospective primary teachers' efficacy beliefs (TEB) with respect to teaching mathematics. Eight student teachers were interviewed in the beginning, in the middle and in the end of a fieldwork course; they were encouraged to reflect…

An action research project was developed and implemented using student self monitoring of higher order thinking skills and task management to improve the music skills of a fifth grade beginning band (n=30) from a small middle school located in a rural midwest village. Evidence of the problem was documented with a performance test, a written test,…

This book explores managing the performance of education staff in England and Wales and in Scotland. It compares the different policies of performance management as practiced in England and Wales and in Scotland. (The Scottish system of education is independent of that of England and Wales.) Chapter 1 provides an introduction to performance…

This is the eighth annual report on California higher education performance indicators prepared by the California Postsecondary Education Commission under a legislative mandate. The report presents background on the development and recent revision of California's performance indicators for higher education, describes the scope of the current set…

This report is third in a series of reports that present the California Community Colleges district- and college-level Management Information System (MIS) baseline information for two fiscal year periods, 1998-99 and 1999-2000, specific to the systemwide Partnership for Excellence performance goals. The Partnership for Excellence is a mutual…

This book describes students' accumulation of literacy and enables teachers to assess students independently of standardized tests. The "Profiles" includes scales and reporting formats, sample materials, guidelines for assessment, and norms. Reporting software issued separately complements this book. The chapters are: (1) "What Is a…

High achieving Puerto Rican high school students are largely missing not only from urban high schools, but also from the educational research. The purpose of this article, then, is to describe the five success factors that ten low-income urban high school students from this ethnic group attributed to their high academic achievement. These success…

This research follows up a study conducted in 1998 by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) to investigate teachers' and students' views on the factors affecting students' choices of whether or not to apply to Oxford and Cambridge universities. It identifies what has changed since 1998 and areas in which the universities could…

The aim of this study was to investigate the factors affecting the implementation of Multiple Intelligences (MI) Theory in K-8 classrooms in Turkey. First, it was made meetings in small groups (3 or 4) with 38 teachers in one of the first MI schools in Turkey during the first semesters. They were 22 elementary teachers from Grades 1 to 5 and 16…