Compares and contrasts the descriptions of American schools and recommendations for school reform in major reports of the 1970s and 1980s and discusses a number of educational issues, including curriculum, teachers and teaching, school administration, academic standards, school climate and environment, and education in and out of school. (JBM)

Working in tandem with the powerful National Education Association's KEYS initiative (Keys to Excellence in Your Schools), this second edition focuses on how to change a school's organizational structure and culture to improve the quality of teaching and learning. Each chapter, revised and updated to address continuous improvement and narrowing…

The first section of this paper on the school library and the learner discusses policies and the school library. Recommendations are offered related to hours, creating an inviting atmosphere, convenience, collection, computer services, reading material selection, storytelling, and reading aloud. The second section addresses principles of learning…

The writer calls attention to the many traps associated with one of the most frequent uses of assessment: the technical difficulties of measuring changes in learning over time. Noting that psychometricians don't like "change" or "difference" scores in statistical analyses because they tend to have lower reliability than the original measures…

This book includes 23 essays on the environmental crisis that address the failures to educate people to think broadly, to perceive systems and patterns, and to live as whole persons. Current educational reforms are driven by the belief that students must be prepared to effectively compete in a global economy. A more important reason to reform…

The term "web-based training" (WBT) is emerging to distinguish the use of the World Wide Web as a training and education tool from other applications. In 1996, about $100 million of the $7 billion spent on training in the United States was spent on WBT. According to estimates, the amount spent on WBT will increase more than 20-fold in 5 years. In…

This book, which is designed to help adult educators in all settings determine the effectiveness of the teaching and learning occurring in their programs, uses real-life case studies to illustrate the application of an evaluation and accountability model based on the principles and concepts of popular education. The book begins with a preface…

This study examines the preliminary results of a 5-year national study on creating communities of learners, provides findings from teachers and principals at 20 schools, analyzes characteristics of high- and low-readiness schools, and discusses the interaction of leadership, vision, values, and the conditions required for professional learning…

This essay argues in favor of extending the social construction of the role of the principal to include dot.com values and experiences, while being alert to identifying those values and experiences that are potentially educative. The premise is that the practical lived experiences of educators, particularly school administrators, are too narrow…

This paper uses concepts from New Institutional Economics and subdisciplines within economics to describe factors related to schools' success. It draws on an exploratory study of a small sample of public and private primary schools in Chile to show that it is possible to apply the concepts proposed in the paper and that there is a positive…

There is a tendency to equate electronic learning or e-learning with distance learning. In fact, e-learning covers a broad spectrum, from learning which is primarily contact based to learning which is 100% distance. Thus, each course can be measured by the proportion of learning and teaching that is intended to be conducted electronically. The…

This paper examines some of the theoretical changes that have led the field of instructional and educational technology into a time of critical transactions. It begins by outlining some of the standard notions and assumptions within the field of instructional technology, and goes on to examine how they may be changing as a result of influences of…

This monograph discusses some of the difficulties that colleges and universities encounter when they seek to study themselves. It finds that despite commendable efforts to establish doctoral programs in higher education, institutes and centers for the study of higher education, and offices of institutional research, there are many discrepancies…

This monograph provides an overview of intervention and programming strategies for students with emotional/behavioral disorders (E/BD) based on the behavioral approach. It reviews the progress of the behavioral perspective in education from its earliest beginnings to the present and describes its major characteristics, chief proponents,…

Contemporary learning--learning in an online world articulates national priorities, strategic directions and requirements to achieve the national vision of all schools confidently using information and communication technologies (ICT) in their everyday practices. This paper highlights issues in the development and application of school-based and…