The Coppin Critical Reading Project at Coppin State College, Maryland is designed to help undergraduate students to become critical readers across a wide range of disciplines through the introduction of significant texts into the general education curriculum, through analysis of these texts from the perspective of the humanities, and through…

The Community Action Volunteers in Education (CAVE), which is described in this report, is a co-curricular learning, non-profit agency offering over 16 programs to children, the elderly, special populations, and low-income residents in the Chico, California, area and in three state institutions in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys. Based at California…

This paper discusses the major components of Project Success, a nationally recognized learning disabilities (LD) support program on the campus of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Its goals include: each student will become academically and socially independent; each student will graduate from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh or some other…

Classroom dialogue is an important influence on students' learning, making the structure and content of dialogue important research variables. An analysis of two sample classroom dialogues using the Thematic and Structural Analysis (TSA) Technique shows a positive correlation between the quality of dialogue structure and the level of student…

Project COMPETE (Community-based Model for Public School Exit and Transition to Employment) was a federally funded service demonstration project to investigate new procedures for secondary education and transition services for youth with moderate, severe, and profound mental retardation. The goal of Project COMPETE was to develop and validate a…

Instructional leadership studies are plentiful but have many shortcomings, including lack of definition of key variables, problems of causality, overrepresentation of exemplary schools, and lack of validity and reliability in research design and implementation. Definitions of "leadership" and "instruction" are needed. There is…

Intended for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students, this book summarizes and puts into a coherent framework the research on reading processes conducted by cognitive psychologists since the early 1970s. The book focuses on the process of reading: how information is extracted from the printed page and comprehended. Part 1 provides…

Inservice training for school administrators is often characterized as sporadic rather than sustained, as topical rather then developmental, and as externally planned rather than internally developed and controlled. There is little evidence to suggest that much of current inservice activity contributes to significant improvement in administrators'…

This paper outlines major contributing factors in the manifestation of successful gifted education programs. The first factor, teacher training, involves the right of gifted children to be educated by specially qualified teachers. A teacher training model leading to certification for teachers of the gifted is described. The second factor, gifted…

Reading test data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were scaled using the unidimensional item response theory model. Data were collected for students aged 9, 13, and 17. To determine whether the responses to the reading items were consistent with unidimensionality, four different methods were applied: (1) principal…

A model for faculty development in colleges of education was developed based on the research on school planning, program and staff development, and school assessment. A needs assessment instrument was developed to identify training needs of principals in instructional leadership roles, and the instrument was revised to assess training needs of…

A student-centered noncredit writing course for students of English as a second language, designed to alleviate the problems of diverse class membership, consists of a series of composition assignments with topics determined by class interests and composition length determined by the student. The entire class participates in prewriting activities;…

This investigation examined the influence of sample size on different goodness-of-fit indices used in confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The first two data sets were derived from large normative samples of responses to a multidimensional self-concept instrument and to a multidimensional instrument used to assess students' evaluations of teaching…

This study examined the difficulty level of essay topics used in the large-scale assessment of writing in relation to five different scoring models, and sought to determine what effects the scoring models would have on passing rates. In model one, examinee's score is the direct result of a score assigned by the reader or the sum of scores assigned…

After observing secondary school students having great difficulty learning geometry in their classes, Dutch educators Pierre van Hiele and Dina van Hiele-Geldof developed a theoretical model involving five levels of thought development in geometry. It is the purpose of this monograph to present English translations of some significant works of the…