The purpose of this study was to ascertain teachers' multicultural knowledge, cross-cultural perceptions, and attitudes about different cultures as a function of both pre-service professional preparation and graduate education curriculum. Accomplishing this goal required administration of the Multicultural/Diversity Scale?Revised (MCR) at…

This document contains a report describing a collaborative initiative involving the regional office and two sub-offices of the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DCF) and four Head Start programs in northwest Connecticut that resulted in positive outcomes for children and families, agency staff, and their communities. Also included…

This study investigated the attitudes toward statistics of graduate students who used a computer program as part of the instruction, which allowed for an individualized, self-paced, student-centered, activity-based course. The twelve sections involved in this study were offered in the spring and fall 2001, spring and fall 2002, spring and fall…

The starting point for this study was the resistant nature of prior knowledge in conceptual change from natural numbers to rational numbers observed in our previous study. Thus, in this study the effects of deliberately teaching the abstraction of the density of numbers on the number line was tested in a quasi-experimental study at the beginning…

Teachers' attitudes play a critical role in the effectiveness of technology. The Technology Attitude Survey (TAS) was developed to assess teachers' attitudes toward the general use of technology as an educational tool in the classroom. Reliability and validity of the TAS were investigated. A small pilot study showed high reliability. Pretest and…

A simulation study of methods of assessing differential item functioning (DIF) in computer-adaptive tests (CATs) was conducted by Zwick, Thayer, and Wingersky (in press, 1993). Results showed that modified versions of the Mantel-Haenszel and standardization methods work well with CAT data. DIF methods were also investigated for nonadaptive…

The epistemological beliefs of teacher-credential students were studied to determine if their beliefs change in sophistication after a semester of training. Also studied was the extent of the relationship between academic and home background variables and epistemological beliefs. A convenience sample of 52 white females in their fifth year of…

This report discusses the outcomes of a practicum designed to address the lack of parent participation in American Sign Language (ASL) training by parents of children with hearing impairments. Using a pretest-posttest design, 46 parents of children who are deaf and receive services from a school for the deaf were surveyed. Based on the needs…

This paper focuses on Michael, one of four seventh grade students who participated in a study involving a constructivist teaching experiment. In the study, manipulatives within a computer microworld were used to solve fractional reasoning tasks and tasks that involved concepts of rate, ratio, and proportionality. Pretest results are presented, and…

In the fall of 2000, the educator/author of this paper volunteered to teach the first completely online geography course at California State University Long Beach (CSULB), an introductory physical geography section. In spring 2001, she offered one section of the class online and another in the traditional lecture/lab format and decided to do a…

North Carolina's Kinder Camp is a 4-week program designed to prepare children for entry into kindergarten. All participants must have completed Project Family Read. A North Carolina elementary school measured the programs effectiveness by using the Cognitive/Language Profile of the American Guidance Service Early Screening Profiles as a pre- and…

Developed specifically for classroom teachers with a limited background in music, oral music lessons are designed to be taught in short, daily instruction segments to help students gain the most from music and transfer that knowledge to other parts of the curriculum. The lessons, a master degree project, were developed to support the Utah music…

This study compared the effects of three forms of online instruction on memory, belief change, and argumentation skill. Reading of a pro/con text was followed by: (1) online discussion in pairs compared to reading of the same text followed by two forms of individualized study techniques derived from the cognitive memory literature; (2)…

In spring 1996 Franklin County (KY) schools conducted a research project with three teachers at Western Hills High School to determine whether student attitudes change as a result of becoming involved in service learning. Each teacher used one class for a test group and another for a control group. Two types of pre- and posttests were given to…

In computerized adaptive testing (CAT), new or experimental items are frequently administered alongside operational tests to gather the pretest data needed to replenish and replace item pools. The two basic strategies used to combine pretest and operational items are embedding and appending. Variable-length CATs are preferred because of the…