The University of Florida Libraries took the opportunity of remodeling its Humanities and Social Sciences library to conceptualize the design of an info commons area for the new building. An Info Commons Concept Team was formed and charged with this task. The team used site visits, surveys, focus groups, and interviews to determine the needs of…

Ulises Mejias examines how social software--information and communications technologies that facilitate the collaboration and exchange of ideas--enables students to participate in distributed research, an approach to learning in which knowledge is collectively constructed and shared. During Fall 2005, Mejias taught a graduate seminar that provided…

The development of an engineering curriculum assumes a body of knowledge that students, as future engineers, will need to know. Students acquire this body of knowledge through lectures, laboratories, projects and assignments and other means. The question then arises, how does one select the content and processes that are appropriate for the…

This article describes a qualitative research study that explored how a middle school case-study class read and responded to "culturally conscious" African American children's books (Sims, 1982, p. 49). First, I relied on literary analyses conducted mainly by Sims (1982) and Harris (1995) to identify African American textual features contained in…

This article presents ways in which students ascertain that what they have learned in mathematics is true. Students in the middle school (and a few from other grades) were interviewed by prospective and in-service teachers. Students were asked what they had learned recently in mathematics and how they knew it was true. The answers were grouped by…

This report presents findings from the second-year evaluation of the Governor's Educator Excellence Grant (GEEG) program. The GEEG program was federally- and state-funded and provided three-year grants to schools to design and implement performance pay plans from the 2005-06 to 2007-08 school years. GEEG was implemented in 99 high poverty, high…

Education names and classifies individuals. This result seems unavoidable. For example, some students will graduate, and some will not. Those who graduate will be "graduates"; those who do not graduate will be labeled otherwise. The only way to avoid such labeling is to fail to make distinctions of any kind. Yet education is rife with…

This paper analyzes the preschool special education eligibility classifications and criteria used by states and the District of Columbia in compliance with Part B of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Four types of eligibility classifications are described: use of only Part B disability categories; use of Part B categories plus a…

The purpose of this study was to identify differentially functioning items on operational administrations of the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) through the use of the Mantel-Haenszel statistic. Retrospective analyses of data collected over 3 years are reported for black/white and female/male comparisons for the Verbal and Quantitative…

A survey was mailed to the 185 U.S. Roman Catholic cathedrals to determine the nature and extent of cathedral music libraries. In addition to baseline demographic information, survey questions focused on the following topics: (1) music library staffing and management; (2) methods of cataloging and classification; (3) the use and creation of…

This study sought to determine the most important goals of the University of the Americas-Puebla (Mexico) through a needs-analysis survey of the faculty. A survey instrument was developed which included a series of 58 goal statements. The university's 168 faculty members were asked to rate the degree to which each goal is being met, rate the…

An ethnographic study documented and analyzed the idiosyncratic symbols kindergarten children employ to encode their experiences in the domains of mathematics, music, and visual art, in order to identify any patterns in use and meaning. In the area of mathematics, children were given common objects and asked to sort them. Four categories of…

A two-dimensional, four-category model for classifying the way that people relate to others, or relationship style, was developed by T. Alessandra (1987). The model characterizes style in terms of openness, with poles of open and self-contained, and directness, with poles of direct and indirect. Combining the poles of the two dimensions yields the…

This activity book designed for grades 1-3 provides teachers with ready-to-use materials designed to get parents and children excited about science, help establish a home-school connection, and provide interesting learning activities for children to share with adults. This program gets parents involved in developing their children's science…

The goal of this guide is to address a major environmental dilemma: worldwide habitat destruction and the disappearance of species. This guide is one of six that are included in the Habitat Ecology Learning Program (HELP), a holistic life science curriculum that involves students in an in-depth study of ecology. HELP includes six teaching guides…