Presents a series of discussions on the general elements of experimental design and the scientific process and relates these elements to the field of communication. (MH)

Describes a study that compared the teaching behavior of teachers in an institution for delinquent children to that of teachers in urban junior high schools. (JG)

Before researchers can adequately establish empirical relationships between teacher behavior as an independent variable and student achievement as a dependent variable, when studying teacher effectiveness, they must deal with the problems of instrumentation, methodology, and statistics. (MM)

A comparative study of the activity environments of five early childhood programs differing in curricular emphasis and population served: a franchise day care, a Head Start program, a Montessori nursery school, a community day care center, and a laboratory nursery school. (MS)

This report presents findings from two investigations of the use of classroom artifacts to measure the presence of reform-oriented teaching practices in middle-school science classes. It complements previous research on the use of artifacts to describe reform-oriented teaching practices in mathematics. In both studies, ratings based on collections…

Educational leaders have sought to change the prevailing teacher-centered pedagogy to a student-centered approach. Despite the widespread awareness of the reform agenda, there is an increasing concern of whether a real instructional change happens in a way to promote students' mathematical development. This paper deals with successes and…

Mathematical norms are important cultural knowledge of mathematical activities. This paper reports an analysis of mathematical norms in ten consecutive lessons taught by an eighth-grade Japanese teacher. The lessons were located in the unit of simultaneous linear equations. The videotapes of the lessons, their transcripts, and the interview data…

The Expressive Arts Outreach (EAO) project, housed at the Center for Best Practices in Early Childhood (the Center) at Western Illinois University, was funded in 2000 by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) as a 3-year outreach project. The target population was 3-8 year old children with a wide range of…

This study focuses on the perspectives of pre-service teachers exposed to cases in an educational psychology course. It considers how students view cases and how their thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes regarding case-based activities change throughout the semester. Both qualitative and quantitative data (participating observations, interviews,…

The Media Center at Eastern Illinois University developed and streamed on the Internet 26 short (one to five minutes) instructional videos about WebCT that illustrated specific functions, including logging-in, changing a password, and using chat. This study observed trainees using and reacting to selections of these videos. It set out to assess…

Strategic Programs for Innovations in Undergraduate Physics (SPIN-UP) set out to answer an intriguing question: Why, in the 1990s, did some physics departments increase the number of bachelor's degrees awarded in physics or maintain a number much higher than the national average for their type of institution? During that decade, the number of…

This research report relates to one aspect of a longitudinal study conducted into children's spelling development during the first three years of formal schooling. The study aimed to monitor the development of conventional spelling in the unaided writing of children 5-7 years of age attending one of six schools in Great Britain and to consider the…

Many aspects of string theory are abstract and difficult for even theoretical physicist to fully comprehend. The activities in this guide are designed to help teachers and students better understand some of the basic concepts underlying particle physics and string theory. A list of additional resources and a glossary are also included. Each…

Most research on scaffolded instruction has been conducted with mothers rather than fathers and has carried the implicit assumption that it is superior to other methods. This study examined fathers' teaching style differences and the effects of those differences on children's recall and transfer of a strategy for solving balance scale problems.…

Reading Recovery teachers can determine the child's literacy performance by using patterns of responding, that is, what the child mostly does in reading and writing. The child's performance informs the teaching, and close observation is the key to being able to "follow the child." Observation is central to the idea of following the…