Profiles programs of two youth centers that are successfully bridging cultural differences through the development of cultural competence. Both centers acknowledge that actualizing cross-cultural competency means providing a way for their ethnic groups to interact with the larger population without losing their cultural heritage. Programs include…

Studied the effects of group formation strategy and levels of tutor intervention on online collaborative learning in a distance education class. Results with 45 undergraduates favor the random assignment of students to collaborative groups and the introduction of tutor intervention during the course of project work. (SLD)

In this special issue, readers were introduced to three powerful, evidence-based instructional practices that hold great promise for ameliorating many of the reading difficulties encountered by pupils in 21st century classrooms. Peer Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS), ClassWide Peer Tutoring (CWPT), and START tutoring have emerged from over…

This article explores 2 important aspects of metacognition: (a) how students monitor their ongoing performance to detect and correct errors and (b) how students reflect on those errors to learn from them. Although many instructional theories have advocated providing students with immediate feedback on errors, some researchers have argued that…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effectiveness of a tutoring intervention provided by community tutors to kindergarten students at risk for reading difficulties. The 73 students were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: (a) tutoring 4 days a week, (b) tutoring 2 days a week, or (c) a control condition that provided…

Outcomes for methods to accelerate thinking skills involving some peer interaction have been more consistently positive than those for purely teacher-directed or materials-led methods. However, methods involving mainly or only peer interaction are rare. This paper describes and evaluates such a method for peer tutoring in thinking skills, which…

As part of a professional development initiative helping secondary school teachers use assessment data to guide their instruction, teachers in this study changed their knowledge, skills and dispositions. Over time, they were able to identify assessments, administer these assessments, interpret the results and plan instruction. As a result, the…

Despite the fact that recidivism can be reduced by an increase in literacy, little information is available about effective educational programming, especially in reading, for adjudicated youth. A short-term, one-to-one tutoring program using low cost materials proved to be successful in increasing reading performance for 12 adjudicated youth.…

Pedagogical agents are gaining acceptance as effective learning tools (Baylor & Ryu, 2003; Moreno, Mayer, Spires & Lester 2001; Moreno, 2004). The increase in the use of agents highlights the need for standardized measurements for evaluating user performance in these environments. While learning gains are a primary variable of interest in such…

This study examines the beliefs of nine white English-only speaking preservice teachers who tutored English language learners of Mexican origin as part of a university field service requirement. Over the course of a semester, participants were interviewed at length about their own reasons for becoming teachers, their beliefs about the children,…

Compared to research on the giving of advice (e.g. Hutchby 1995), relatively less work has been conducted on the receiving or resisting of advice, where the interactionally problematic nature of advising is crystallized (e.g. Heritage and Sefi 1992). Moreover, the notion of advising in education settings has predominantly concerned procedural…

We conducted a meta-analysis of 36 studies of Reading Recovery (RR), an intensive tutorial intervention designed to develop the literacy skills of low-performing first-grade students. Few individual studies of the program have yielded conclusive evidence regarding the program's effectiveness due to various methodological limitations. We relied on…

This paper presents Bigger Bits, an interactive multimedia learning environment that teaches students about VLSI within the context of computer electronics. The system was built with COSMOS (Content Oriented semantic Modelling Overlay Scheme), which is a modelling scheme that we developed for enabling the semantic content of multimedia to be used…

This paper focuses on three distinctive ways in which educational software can support learning dialogues in primary classrooms. After a re-capitulation of published research on Initiation, "Discussion," Response, Feedback (IDRF) exchanges, where the computer is used to stimulate discussion and then direct it through using feedback, we ask if…

As part of our annual feature "From the Inside," this article provides a glimpse at the improved educational outcomes that are possible when children in foster care have a continuity of service, a consistency of support, and a collaboration among professionals.