Secondary vocational-technical education programs in Mississippi are faced with many challenges resulting from sweeping educational reforms at the national and state levels. Schools and teachers are increasingly being held accountable for providing true learning activities to every student in the classroom. This accountability is measured through…

Due in part to conflicting opinions and research results, the practice of sustained silent reading (SSR) in schools has been questioned. After a frustrating experience with SSR, the author of this article began a data-driven decision-making process to gain new insights on how to structure silent reading in a classroom, including a comparison…

Results of a 1992 survey showed that up to 39% of adolescents and colleges students may be affected by nonclinical depression. While research shows that depression is related to achievement, it is not yet clear how depression and achievement are related. However, current data do indicate that depressed individuals may show a general malaise about…

This research abstract is based on two studies: first, "Student and Instructional Outcomes under Varying Student-Teacher Ratios in Special Education" and, second, "A Case Study Analysis of Factors Related to Effective Student-Teacher Ratios", both by Martha L. Thurlow and others. The studies investigated the effects of various student-teacher…

This study investigates the relationship between speed of recognition and accuracy of the responses when visual mental imagery is controlled through imagery instructions. The procedure was to compare the achievement of learners where the independent variable was imagery instructions. The subjects were two 20-person groups of undergraduates from a…

The Accelerated School Program is designed to improve the education of disadvantaged students by using "acceleration" techniques used with gifted and talented students. The goal is to speed up the learning of at-risk students so they will be able to perform at grade level by the end of elementary school. Central to the strategy is the…

Designed to study individual use of time spent in reading during regularly scheduled language arts instruction in a natural classroom setting, this coding sheet consists of nine categories: (1) engagement, (2) area of language arts, (3) instructional setting, (4) partner (teacher or pupil(s)), (5) source of content, (6) type of unit, (7) assigned…

Contending that the four commonplaces of defensible educational thought (the learner, the teacher, the milieu, and the subject matter) do not deal with the complexities of time and its implications for curriculum and instruction, this paper presents time as a crucial element in curricular deliberation. Various aspects of time in the school setting…

The Classroom Pairing System (CPS) for second language instruction is a simple pattern practice technique that allows students to practice orally with a partner. An advantage of the technique is that it allows maximum time on task for each student in a large class. Students hold picture cards in their hands, and the partners ask and answer…

The Time for Mastery Program was specifically designed to minimize the time costs of mastery learning by maximizing the use of instructional time to the fullest advantage. The program was implemented by three high school districts in suburban Chicago during the 1984-85 academic year. This article presents a brief description of the program, as…

This paper discusses the creation of analytic categories that were applied to behavior in quite different, contrasting settings and that at the same time retained their ecological validity. In Project Follow Through, behavior stream observations were conducted on 20 second-grade children for an entire school day. To study the structure of behavior…

Although policymakers have recently tended to call for longer school days or years, such reforms might be ineffective or counterproductive if they fail to take into account the interactions between time and other determinants of learning, including the role of the student in allocating time. Research has shown that the amount of learning is a…

Twenty-six elementary grade learning disabled (LD) students were observed over two entire school days to examine the extent to which students in different service delivery levels were provided with varying instructional approaches and opportunities to learn. Several differences were found in instructional approaches: less severely learning…

This document provides administrators and instructional supervisors a framework for thinking about teaching and learning in secondary schools and suggests specific focal points for working with teachers to maintain and improve teaching effectiveness. The first section contains a discussion of instructional time and its meaning for secondary…

Uses data from ethnographic study in two Quechua-speaking communities of Puno, Peru, to explore schooltime spent in other-than-academic endeavors. Documents uses to which schooltime is put in these communities, and then seeks to account for observed uses of time in terms of ethnographically derived insights as to social, cultural, economic, and…