The literature base on technology professional development for teachers reveals that there is a long way to go in understanding methods of effective practice with respect to the various impacts of these activities on teaching and learning. In the No Child Left Behind era, with programs like Preparing Tomorrow's Teachers to Use Technology, the Fund…

A significant issue in correctional education is the lack of policy-relevant data comparable across states. This article describes an effort to address this issue: the Correctional Education Data Guidebook and website and the two research projects that led to their development. Analyzing results from two national surveys conducted by the U.S.…

The accountability imperative requires schools to evaluate the effectiveness of educational programs. Florida answered the accountability imperative by instituting statewide objective assessments and assigning grades to schools. The latter move led to several initiatives concerning the practices that improve schools in Florida. This article…

This article reports a study of coauthor Laura Wright as she learned to teach secondary school grammar in four settings: university teacher education program, student teaching, her first job, and second job. Data for her university program came from Laura's journals and projects from her course work. Data from student teaching and her first job…

This paper is based on a study of how students' read nature in different ecosystems. Its focus is on ecology and the context is outdoors. This literacy has to do with an ability to recognise organisms and relate them to material cycling and energy flow in the specific habitat that is to be read. A teaching sequence was designed in order to develop…

The Rehabilitation Act of 1973, together with the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, set in motion policy changes that have allowed many thousands of children and youth with disabilities in the United States the opportunity to gain the educational and vocational skills needed to transition to living, working, and participating as…

This article describes an engaging, data-gathering activity that allows students to explore relationships between latitude and average monthly temperatures of cities in the Western Hemisphere. This data-gathering activity covered interesting and important mathematical ground and engaged students from the start. While students searched for their…

This report presents the deliberations of the Northwest Regional Advisory Committee (NW RAC), one of 10 RACs established under the Educational Technical Assistance Act of 2002 to assess the educational needs of the region. The Northwest RAC accepted its charge to identify educational needs and to make recommendations, working collaboratively as…

Based on Penn State's popular "Innovation Insights" series, this book brings together in one handy reference nearly a decade of tried and true insights into continuous quality improvements in higher education. Their five-step model for integrating planning, assessment, and improvement moves plans off the shelf and into the weekly and daily…

A long standing debate among policymakers as well as researchers is whether and how funding affects the quality of education. Often missing from the discussion is information about the costs of providing education at the school level and below, yet such information could impart a better indication of the linkages between outcomes and resources…

The present study explored the ways in which the production of digital media, specifically podcasts (i.e., downloadable digital audio files), rooted in the key tenets of critical literacy, can support education for democracy, in addition to the overall benefits and barriers of podcasting in an elementary classroom. The project can be considered a…

Scholars have provided numerous critical analyses of the structural causes of poverty. Unfortunately, many teachers are still led to believe, via best selling books and mainstream discourse, that behaviors, neighborhoods, and families determine educational outcomes. This "culture of poverty" theory must be disproved; educators need to be…

State Education Agencies (SEAs) lead the charge for effective change, impact, and sustainability in the adoption and implementation of programs and practices that promote school completion. Steps taken by state and local education agencies to decrease dropout include (a) collection, analysis, and public reporting of "dropout" rates and related…

This guide is designed as a resource for leaders and evaluators of K-12 online learning programs. In this guide, the term "online learning" is used to refer to a range of education programs and resources in the K-12 arena, including distance learning courses offered by universities, private providers, or teachers at other schools;…

A study was conducted to investigate the teaching methods valued and used by faculty in Arkansas public higher education institutions at the freshman and sophomore levels. The participants were 336 teachers who responded to a 21 item survey distributed to college teachers in Arkansas. The study sought to collect relevant demographic data and to…