This theme issue on recreation includes annotated listings of Web sites, CD-ROMs, computer software, videos, books, magazines, and professional resources that deal with recreation for K-8 language arts, art/architecture, music/dance, science, math, social studies, and health/physical education. Sidebars discuss fun and games, recess recreation,…

This article describes a preliminary information-gathering activity that examined 37 professionals' perceptions of their roles and that of families in the augmentative and alternative communication processes. Transcripts of proceedings were analyzed, and perceptions were organized around five themes: communication style, specific information…

To study the importance of acknowledging cultural factors when retraining teacher educators in developing nations, researchers examined the learning experiences of teacher educators and inservice teachers in Papua New Guinea. Results highlighted how educators handled incongruencies between their own beliefs about teaching and learning and those…

Describes the Better Together project and website, which connected preservice teachers with seventh-grade reluctant readers through pen-pal correspondences and email, a variety of small and large group technology-based activities, tutoring, and classroom visits and teaching. Offers descriptions from two of the preservice teachers. Discusses…

The absence of a language policy in a rural central Illinois school district with a rapidly growing population of migrant Spanish-speaking students seriously affected the academic achievement and social inclusion of newcomer students. A case study focuses on attitudes and reactions of three teacher groups: English-only teachers, "bridge…

Provides an overview of digital libraries research, practice, and literature. Highlights include new technologies; redefining roles; historical background; trends; creating digital content, including conversion; metadata; organizing digital resources; services; access; information retrieval; searching; natural language processing; visualization;…

Compared caregiver-child discourse surrounding information and narrative picture books with twelve 4-year-olds. Found that discourse surrounding the informational book was greater in quantity than for the picture book, and contained more cognitively demanding questions, more conditional clauses, and more interactions involving reasoning and…

This research examined the impact of the first-year implementation of an instructional intervention to promote achievement and equity in science and literacy for culturally and linguistically diverse elementary students. The research addressed three areas: (a) overall science and literacy achievement, (b) achievement gaps among demographic…

This article discusses some important aspects of a three-year educational project (1997-2000) that took place in an Athenian primary school where a high percentage (60%) of pupils did not have Greek as their mother tongue. The principal objective of the project was to create, through a variety of approaches, conditions that would allow the…

The purpose of this paper is to present an argument for understanding the factors that support or constrain the development of Chicana/o students' academic identities and consequently, their academic resiliency in high school. The article draws on a larger study investigating ways that schooling structures and teacher mind-sets can sustain…

The authors describe various parenting behaviors, such as nurturance, discipline, teaching, and language use, and explain how researchers measure them. They note racial and ethnic variations in several behaviors. Most striking are differences in language use. Black and Hispanic mothers talk less with their young children than do white mothers and…

The Reflective Tutorial Dialogue System (ReTuDiS) is a system for learner modelling historical text comprehension through reflective dialogue. The system infers learners' cognitive profiles and constructs their learner models. Based on the learner model the system plans the appropriate--personalized for learners--reflective tutorial dialogue in…

In this paper we describe the ways that SCoT, a Spoken Conversational Tutor, uses flexible and adaptive planning as well as multimodal task modeling to support the contextualization of learning in reflective dialogues. Past research on human tutoring has shown reflective discussions (discussions occurring after problem-solving) to be effective in…

The role of conceptual modeling in Educational Adaptive Hypermedia Applications (EAHA) is especially important. A conceptual model of an educational application depicts the instructional solution that is implemented, containing information about concepts that must be ac-quired by learners, tasks in which learners must be involved and resources…

Family literacy programs reflect a recent trend in educational reform that has proven to be a successful educational model for all members of the family unit. Based on the literature that links family involvement to student achievement, these initiatives focus on empowering parents of school children. These programs have been particularly…