In December 1993, children who were in grade 3 in the Trenton Public Schools (New Jersey) in 1985-86 will take a high-risk writing proficiency test to determine whether they will graduate from high school. An emerging study of the writing of the Class of 1995 in Trenton is described as students move toward that test. The activity of studying…

The study described in this report was conducted by the Center for the Study of Community Colleges to assess the status of two-year college education in the fine and performing arts. Part I includes a review of available literature on arts education at community colleges and relates that literature to issues raised by others writing about arts…

This study was designed to find: a suitable effect size (ES) measure or common metric (CM) for comparing the results of a set of single subject research (SSR) studies; and an easy way to convert the published graphs back into raw data from which ESs could be calculated. To meet the first objective, three possible formulas for measuring treatment…

To attempt to incorporate the perceptions of consumers of alcohol education programs about topic relevance and importance, a modified version of a methodology that extracts, evaluates, and combines information from novices and experts to determine commonly held scripts and schema was used. In the first of two studies, 37 students at Texas…

This paper reviews the literature on the effects of what children do with their time out of school and the impact of various care arrangements. Much of the research has focused on "latchkey children": children who care for themselves. In this paper, a summary of the research findings on the latchkey group is followed by a review of what is known…

While the concepts of language continuum and diglossia are widely cited and discussed, they remain generally vague and are used in different ways by different linguists. Recent sociolinguistic research on Dutch-speaking Belgium provides a framework for examining the two concepts, a context for proposing a theoretical definition for language…

If nonverbal decoding skills are impaired by cultural expectations and training, the deaf person will be further isolated from social participation. To identify factors that might account for inaccurate nonverbal decoding of deaf subjects, a study compared the decoding abilities of three groups of deaf college students (N=76) using R. Rosenthal's…

This report analyzes the effects of multiunit school organization on elementary teachers' patterns of task-related communication. Multiunit teacher work teams, or units, are characterized by discussions between teachers about the intimate details of their daily work; this contrasts with the structurally undifferentiated organization of…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) currently tests seventeen-year-old students enrolled in public and private secondary schools, but it does not test "out-of-school" seventeen-year-olds who have either graduated or dropped out. Estimating that one of five seventeen-year-olds is out of school, the interpretability of…

Ways in which language teachers can formally investigate the teaching and learning processes occurring in their classrooms are discussed in four sections. The topics covered include: the concept of research , its variety of meanings, and the prestige associated with it; the classroom teacher's traditional role with regard to research and how that…

Teacher competency testing is not new, but since the mid-1970s the number of states requiring new teachers to be tested has grown rapidly. States differ in their definition of competence, in the methods they use to assess competence, and in the treatment of teachers who do not meet competency requirements. This monograph describes a national…

The "informal process" for writing reports, which incorporates the mechanics of textbook theory but emphasizes the composition process, may be more successful for teaching fifth graders how to write reports than the traditional approach. This process recommends a number of nontraditional teaching methods. Student choice of topic should…

A longitudinal study of the educational paths of humanities majors was conducted with a sample of high school seniors who participated in the National Longitudinal Study (NLS) of the High School Class of 1972. Comparisons to the 1980 NLS seniors cohort were also made. Students completed a survey as seniors as well as four follow-up surveys. The…

Dolphin is a computer-assisted instruction system used to teach and reinforce skills in reading, language arts, and mathematics. An evaluation of this system was conducted to provide information to TSC Division of Houghton Mifflin regarding its effectiveness and possible modifications to the system. The general design of the evaluation was to…

A review was conducted of the occupational clusters used to organize the delivery of secondary vocational education in Oregon. The review focused on issues related to Oregon's current and projected labor market needs, national occupational and industrial trends, and the common skills and competencies that form the basis for organizing occupations…