How schools and districts approach professional development is driven by implicit and explicit personal beliefs or theories. This article describes four factors that determine the success or failure of staff development efforts for teachers: teacher motivation; teacher knowledge and how teachers can add to it; how the context of teacher work…

Suggests that counselors of all types need an understanding of and an ability to work with issues described by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Explains that the traditional approach to the DSM-IV tends to locate the problem in the client, whereas the developmental approach focuses on the client in social and historical…

Describes the conceptual design, research framework, evaluation components, and analytic strategies that are guiding the evaluation of a demonstration-research effort, the American Stop Smoking Intervention Study (ASSIST). The ASSIST evaluation is a unique analysis of the relationships among social context, public-health activity, tobacco use, and…

Reviews research related to the second language acquisition social context, and the interface of social context and interlanguage grammar. (Author/VWL)

Two studies examined the relationship between maternal sensitivity and infant security of attachment in home and hospital contexts. Results are discussed in terms of links between methodology and effect sizes, the generality of links between maternal care and child security, need for research on caregiving in ordinary and emergency situations, and…

Examines the issue of learning physics content through real-life contexts. Considers two projects--one from the United Kingdom, the other from Australia--that use a context-based learning approach. (Author/CCM)

Considers the learning process and suggests that learners need to be more in control. Topics include learning that takes place without leaders; the influence of past experiences; learning from context as well as from content; engaged learning and the importance of interaction; instructional objectives; and the effect of values. (LRW)

Investigated whether living in a deprived area compounded residents' disadvantaged status and whether area effects contributed to social exclusion. Data from surveys conducted in deprived and socially mixed neighborhoods indicated that both structure and agency were important in influencing neighborhood problems, though living in areas of…

Investigates the effects of choice and response format on children's search of informational text. Results reveal that choice of topic facilitated both performance and process measures, whereas response format affected process measures only. Prior knowledge emerged as a significant contributor to accuracy and time to locate information. (Contains…

This study investigated whether discourse context affected the intelligibility of synthesized sentences for young adult and older adult listeners. Findings indicated a significant facilitating effect of context wherein previous words and sentences are related to later sentences for both listener groups. Results have direct implications for…

The purpose of this paper is to examine traditional organizational structures and leadership styles in Canada, to assess their responsiveness to a changing educational, social and political context, and to propose an alternative approach. We argue that the educational enterprise would benefit from distancing itself from these traditional models,…

There is much current interest in the identification of effective programmes for raising literacy standards. However, the effectiveness of such programmes might vary greatly according to implementation integrity and the preferred teaching styles or behaviours of teachers. This research explored whether highly effective teachers of literacy used…

This article explores the strengths and weaknesses of Lave and Wenger's concept of "legitimate peripheral participation" as a means of understanding workplace learning. It draws on recent ESRC-funded research by the authors in contemporary workplace settings in the UK (manufacturing industry and secondary schools) to establish the extent…

We tend to overlook the fact that we judge performances in context. That is why people who are generally competent outside the classroom can appear so inept inside it. "Can you read this text?" is not merely a demand to make some sense of it, but often, in school, to identify plot, character, author intent, or at a minimum, to be ready to recast…

This article focuses on improving schools in difficult or disadvantaged contexts. It explores the contemporary policy discourse and intervention strategies aimed at improving schools in such circumstances. It argues that contemporary approaches to improvement are unlikely to succeed because the approaches adopted are not sufficiently…