One of the most commonly used instructional methods in adult education is the small group. Small group learning is a staple of the adult education enterprise. Small groups are used in higher education, adult literacy and basic education, and many forms of training (Taylor, Marienau, & Fiddler, 2000). Some write solely about it (Brookfield…

This review examines twenty years of research (1985-2005) on African-American students in science education. This analysis identified three types of research studies on African-Americans. First, a series of studies provided status reports of African-American students' performance in science. Second, a series of studies highlighted cultural…

The majority of youth in corrections have had negative school experiences and below average academic achievement. Longitudinal research indicates that both academic failure and a negative life-long trajectory are a probability for many youth confined to correctional facilities. Given the high number of youth from ethnic and cultural minority…

Program accountability is increasingly important in teacher education. Yet, program accountability often implies reporting quantitative data in an easy-to-understand visual format. Such data can lack validity when numbers are small and they may confuse issues of candidate performance with candidate understanding. In this study, four teacher…

John Shank and Steven Bell describe A_FLIP (Administrators, Faculty, Librarians Instructional Partnership), a model of professional collaboration that promotes the fuller integration of appropriate library resources into the overall structure of course management systems as well as the online design of specific courses. As they outline their…

"We cannot allow the quality of special services to preclude conquering reading disabilities (Horne, 1978, p. 582)." This study was conducted to explore how teachers' spelling abilities relate to student outcomes. The results indicated that the students enrolled in classrooms where the teachers had the lowest knowledge of phoneme-grapheme…

This research looked at the population of children learning braille in Britain, where they are being educated, and issues concerned with teaching braille and with training of teachers of braille. A national postal questionnaire survey of local education authority (LEA) visual impairment (VI) advisory services and one specialist school for blind…

This study focused on a particular course entitled Raising Standards in Writing and attempted to discover if it did impact on pupil attainment and change teachers' practices. The course was provided by a Local Education Authority and used National Literacy Strategy materials. It was developed in the context of the British government's concern…

In this paper, I argue that it is important to bring proficiency in written English language into the frame of a critical pedagogy for academic literacy. This may at first seem a counter-intuitive goal with connotations of constraint and convergence rather than opening up and diversity. However, what is often not taken into account in the notion…

This paper reports on two critical incidents in the progress towards implementing a vernacular language programme in the village school at Aulua, Malakula, in Vanuatu. In stage one of the fieldwork, (2000-1) an orthography was created by a committee. An element of the second stage of the project (2004-5) was a workshop to create the primers and…

Stories are the most natural form of communication and learning among humans. In this paper, we describe how we have designed and implemented an case library of technology integration stories to support pre-service and in-service teachers learning how to integrate technologies into their teaching. The case library was built using the artificial…

This article reports the results of a pilot intervention to improve the social skills and literacy preparation of behaviorally at-risk Head Start children. Teachers in eight Head Start classrooms in two Oregon communities participated during the 2002-03 school year. Children in eight classrooms were screened and identified for participation using…

The purpose of this article is to suggest ways of using research on children's reasoning and learning to elaborate on existing national standards and to improve large-scale and classroom assessments. The authors suggest that "learning progressions"--descriptions of successively more sophisticated ways of reasoning within a content domain based on…

Within the current climate of heightened interest in the education of young children, it is essential that consideration be given to different factors which may impact, either positively or negatively, on the achievement of young learners when their academic progress in literacy and numeracy is considered. The research study reported in this paper…

This article examines students' narrative responses to reading professional literacy histories. Demonstrating the importance of narrative as a way of learning, it shows how elementary education majors of diverse backgrounds explore their relation with language in a traditional grammar class. Cajun, Creole, and African American students recover…