Examines and critiques development of a set of performance indicators in New Zealand higher education introduced as a result of recent reforms. Outlines policy context and considers the indicators' role and significance within new mechanisms designed to improve accountability and efficiency. Reviews university opposition to the 1990 Education…

Discusses situated cognition and anchored instruction and makes recommendations for effecting change in mathematics curricula in the early school years based on the experience of the Educational and Community Change (ECC) Project, which is involved with reinventing education in a low-income, multilanguage area. (Contains 26 references.) (MKR)

A set of predictions based on Reinhart's (1986) Theory of Relevance are evaluated against published results of tests of Binding Theory. Relevance Theory provides a means of understanding constraints on testing syntactic knowledge. Pragmatic factors must be systematically controlled in any evaluation of syntactic knowledge. (Contains 22…

A study of 10 Long Island school districts suggests that successful detracking is tantamount to school restructuring. To succeed, a detracking effort must acknowledge the magnitude of the changes involved. Detracking must be carefully planned and initiated, address skeptics' and resisters' concerns, prepare teachers adequately, and align…

Administrators can create a climate of caring in today's schools despite negative characterizations toward education. This article describes attempts to improve school climate at an inner-city school in Durham, North Carolina. Cooperative learning, increased community participation, and action research facilitated by a partnership with the…

Superintendents and key executives from 22 California districts were asked to interpret and evaluate 8 restructuring approaches. Viewpoints expressed offer contrasting assessments shaped by the issue's salience and explicitness, interest in performance improvement versus public confidence development, and concern for accountability versus…

Discusses the knowledge utilization activities of foundations that support research and demonstrations in the health field. Topics addressed include the dissemination of relevant information; strategies for promoting the use of new knowledge; context for knowledge utilization activities; interviews with foundation officers about dissemination and…

Examines affective facial expression in conversation. Demonstrates that the accuracy of affect-identification for conversational facial expressions generally is no better than chance. Demonstrates that most conversational facial expressions, regardless of true source emotion or the affect signaled in isolation, tend to be interpreted according to…

Discusses communicative acts involving at least two persons, whereby a relationship is established between them, based on the use of language in a given context. The purpose of this study is to clarify the notions that such a relationship is often considered to require or contain some measure of understanding between the persons engaged in it. (19…

Experiments with 251 male and 280 female college students demonstrated that subjects' representations of the water levels in a tilted container could be influenced by problem presentation. Subjects who did not appear to know that water remains horizontal were attempting to solve an object-relative, rather than environment-relative, problem. (SLD)

The Teacher Assessment Project at Stanford University focused on both simulation exercises and portfolios. Although portfolios are messy to construct, difficult to score, and vulnerable to misrepresentation, they provide a connection to the contexts and personal realities of real teaching and help document teaching and learning over time.…

Reports four experiments that examined four-year olds' ability to coordinate orthogonal spatial dimensions. Found that performance was particularly good when two imagined lines of sight were the dimensions to be coordinated. Results support the notion that young children perform better when tasks are set in a meaningful context. (MM)

Draws on evolutionary biology to provide implications for the case study method, to promote a better understanding of contingency, and to confirm the status of case study. Argues that contingency unites the details that make the case portray part of a greater category and that make it a unique instance. (DSK)

Describes experiences during the field-testing and development of the Mathematics in Context (MiC) project from the developer and classroom teacher points of view. (ASK)

For analytic purposes, contends that, in principle, culture is an unapparent and functionally unimportant element of routine everyday interactions. It is when persons, relationships, and episodes are evaluated by the participants or others in the community, and what the participants opt to say, or not say, that we come face-to-face with culture.…