Examines New Jersey school boards and investigates what factors affect whether boards operate according to a professional or political model and whether professional and political boards differ in their governance role. The majority of school boards adopt the professional orientation. However, board influence depends primarily on board acceptance…

For assistant principals to become effective leaders and the assistantship to become a feasible position, the office's dynamics and context must be understood, people must be better trained to meet the position's demands, and the job must be made a more appropriate training ground for the principalship. Both university and school district…

The extent to which differences in age-graded sociocultural contexts influenced adolescent future-oriented goals, concerns, and related temporal extension was studied in 596 Australian adolescents. Overall, results show that goals, concerns, and related temporal extension reflect the major developmental tasks of adolescents' own ages. (SLD)

In Temple Independent School District (Texas), the success of strategic planning is evident in increased community and parent involvement, renewed public confidence, and a sense of control over the future. Over 250 community and school people participated in developing the district's plan. Site-based strategic planning extended active involvement…

Summarizes two Israeli case studies concerning an internal curriculum coordinator functioning as a school staff member and an external curriculum coordinator delegated by a national project. The schools had similar (participative) educational philosophies. Studies highlighted the principal-coordinator relationship, personal factors affecting the…

A framework of contextual variables is described that comprises the context of investigation of any evaluation study. Examples from cross-cultural evaluation are used to illustrate the elements of this framework: (1) setting; (2) topic; and (3) design. The framework is useful for evaluation training and planning. (SLD)

Conducts experiments to investigate the effects of extra contexts (pictures or example sentences) on learning context-dependent words. Finds no differences from results obtained with context-free words and shows that extra contexts inhibit learning context-dependent words in simultaneous presentations. Notes that application of feedback techniques…

A shift in emphasis from product to process has had a profound influence on the way writing is taught. Articles in this theme issue focus on developing the ability to write for communication, the ability to manage the writing process, and an understanding of the social context in which the writing process is embedded. (SLD)

Investigates the effect of orientation of depth cues on the magnitude of perceived depth in pictures. Finds that, for each test drawing, the orientation with the far point above the near point provided greater depth perception than any other orientation. Discusses possible contributions of observer experience and height of visual field. (DSK)

Highlights unifying concerns in the articles contained in this special issue. The three main themes that constitute critical approaches to TESOL are the focus: the domain or area of interest, transformative pedagogy, and a self-reflexive stance on critical theory. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the development of the concept of context within the field of culture and cognition, focusing on work in the cultural-historical tradition. Some of the failure of educational innovations in everyday classrooms can be attributed to the separation of context and cognition in educational innovations. (SLD)

Examines and interprets the role of the government-controlled radio-television station in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Considers historical and political contexts of the genocide and analyzes excerpts from radio broadcasts and observational accounts. Interprets, via several strands of communication, scholarship related to collective reaction effects…

When pioneering longitudinal studies of child development extended into adulthood, they generated issues that could not be addressed satisfactorily by available theories, including the recognition that individual lives are influenced by their ever-changing historical context and that human development concepts should apply to processes across the…

Used a modification of Akhtar, Carpenter, and Tomasello's (1996) task involving interpretation of novel nouns to test whether 18- to 28-month-olds' smart word learning derived from general attention and memory processes rather than knowledge about the communicative intents of others. Findings similar to those of Akhtar and colleagues suggest that…

Because of continuous centering and recentering, paradigm shifts posited by Kuhn are not really changes; they are commensurate. New theories are simply old theories remade and renamed. The alternative is to consider conceptual diversity, abandoning the idea of a paradigm or a singular field of theory and practice. (Contains 27 references.) (MLH)