International research and academic performance measures indicate that boys are scoring lower on standardized tests than girls in reading and writing. At the time of this study, boys had lower standardized test scores than girls in an elementary school in a southeastern state in the United States. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to…

Adult students are more anxious about writing for school, less familiar with academic conventions, and more likely to drop out than younger students. For students learning to move between personal, work, and academic discourse communities, the ongoing and explicit writing instruction argued for in the research of Sternglass, Herrington and Curtis,…

This experimental study examined the effect of a differentiated, enriched reading program on students' oral reading fluency and comprehension using the schoolwide enrichment model-reading (SEM-R). Treatment and control conditions were randomly assigned to 63 teachers and 1,192 second through fifth grade students across five elementary schools.…

With electronic technologies, differentiated instruction has the same meaning as in traditional instruction, but different tools are available for teachers to help students learn. Electronic technologies for differentiated instruction can add powerful new types of media inclusion, levels of interactivity, and response actions. This rapidly…

Appropriate special education is unquestionably beneficial for children with "real" disabilities. It offers them an individualized education plan to help develop their potential. But special education for children without specific disabilities, as more often the case of minorities, is unjustifiable. For the latter children, special…

How does one build connections with students who do not feel they are part of the school community? Penn-Trafford High School in Harrison City, Pennsylvania, always seemed to have a number of students who felt no connection to the school or their classmates. They skipped class or didn't participate when they did attend. They were prime candidates…

At first consideration, the worlds of the classroom, the psychotherapy office and the experimental psychology laboratory may seem disparate settings with no obvious connection among them. In this article, the author would like to draw such a connection and to suggest the relevance of psychosocial developmental theory and research to self-regulated…

Technology is helping to meet a critical 21st-century challenge: how to equip the swelling number of autistic students to enter the mainstream student population. Technology-based solutions, such as tools for teaching kids how to recognize facial expressions, are giving educators a means of helping autistic students acquire basic life skills. The…

The authors provide teachers with a rationale for engaging students in independent reading using a differentiated approach. By profiling types of readers, sharing observational tools, and offering teaching suggestions for each type of reader the authors give practical suggestions to facilitate reading engagement and make independent reading more…

An adaptive educational system that uses adaptive presentation is presented. In this system fragments of different images present the same content and the system can choose the one most relevant to the user based on the sequential-global dimension of Felder-Silverman's learning style theory. In order to retrieve the learning style of each student…

In many ways, meeting the needs of gifted students through differentiation of curriculum and instruction within the regular classroom seems a perfect solution to the issues that have plagued gifted education for many years and remain largely unresolved. So why "is" it a myth that differentiated instruction in the regular classroom is an…

Students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) frequently demonstrate language delays (American Psychiatric Association "2000"). This study investigated the effects of a Direct Instruction (DI) language program implemented with elementary students with ASD. There is little research in the area of DI as a language intervention for students with ASD.…

Too often, parents of children with disabilities come with negative expectations about the intentions of the teachers and administrators who are proposing an education plan for their son or daughter. In preparation, they arm themselves with advocates, lawyers, and a myriad of outside evaluations in preparation for the "battle" ahead. In…

The purpose of this applied dissertation study was to determine the relative impact of parental involvement, parental school perception, student generation status, and Caribbean adolescents' own attitudes and behavior towards academic achievement and reading comprehension skills. For this study, 45 Caribbean parents from Grenadian, Guyanese,…

This paper presents the annual activities of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) during 2008-2009. SSAT's activities this year have reflected its commitment to the priorities of the Government's Children's Plan. Its active and expert support of specialist schools, academies and trust schools continued to develop and enrich the…