The Graduate Partnerships Program (GPP), established in 2000, links universities with National Institutes of Health (NIH) laboratories for predoctoral training. Several partnerships required that students create collaborative dissertations between at least one NIH and one university research mentor. More than 60 students have entered into these…

Peer-led team learning (PLTL) is a program of small-group workshops, attached to a course, under the direction of trained peer leaders who have completed the course. Peer leaders ensure that team members engage with the materials and with each other, they help build commitment and confidence, and they encourage discussion. Studies of PLTL have…

Great theoretical debate has occurred in whether a teacher not of the same biological origin of the author of a text can do justice to the literature of another ethnic or racial group in the class. However, mainstream public university students of largely white populations feel themselves "indoctrinated" in classrooms which have the aim…

This booklet presents the Reading Framework for the 1992, 1994, and 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Developed through a national consensus process as part of an effort to move assessment forward, the framework presented in the booklet is more consistent with contemporary knowledge about reading and more relevant to the…

The A.I.M. (Avondale Integrative Model) Program of Avondale School District in Auburn Hills, Michigan, is a developmental, language-based, preschool program, combining federally funded Head Start and district-funded Pre-Primary Impaired programs. The program is designed to utilize a developmentally appropriate curriculum in order to successfully…

Schools serve as agents of socialization, that help adolescents to become self-governing adults. In addition to the school's academic program, cocurricular activities function as mechanisms for attaining necessary goals of student development, such as self-esteem, interpersonal skills, and leadership. This document presents the rationale for…

Researchers on the Lasting Benefits Study (LBS) are tracking students who participated in Tennessee's K-3 Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) Project (1985-89) as they continue into later grades. Project STAR was a statewide experiment conducted to demonstrate the effects of reduced student/teacher ratios (15:1) on student achievement…

This document consists of the first year's output (5 issues) of a newsletter describing opportunities and resources for youth who are academically gifted, in an effort to achieve a match between their interests and abilities and their educational programming. The theme of the first issue is "Entering Academic Competitions." It describes selected…

Talent searches are discussed in this journal theme issue, with two feature articles and several recurring columns. "Talent Search: A Driving Force in Gifted Education," by Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, defines what a talent search is, how the Talent Search was developed by Dr. Julian Stanley at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, the…

Colleges and universities face the major problem of how to make a university education meaningful in a global society. It is the thesis of this book that study abroad is one of the most powerful tools available for internationalizing the U.S. higher education curriculum. After an Introduction giving a general overview of the book, the study begins…

The United States educational system is not meeting the increasing demand for highly skilled workers required in the international marketplace. While local, state, and federal governments spend $221 billion on public elementary and secondary education, only a small percentage of the nation's students have adequate reasoning and problem-solving…

There is a need to expand the notion of acceptable thinking practices to include nontraditional thinking and wonder. Such an approach can help students learn to deal with ambiguity. The unique design of ambiguous thought evokes wonder, discovery, interrelationships, and new connections. Ambiguous thinking refrains from making unequivocal…

This document combines the findings of two projects for the purpose of making some overall observations about the state of religious youth work in the United States. The first project was a review of the literature on such programs. Research on the topic is rare, while a vast body of indirectly related research spans many disciplines and empirical…

A common problem in an "experiential class" is the lack of attention devoted to group closure at the end of the course. Toward the end of the semester, students working in small groups in organizational behavior classes often experience anxiety over losing the support and identity that they enjoyed as members of a small learning group. A final…

This Digest discusses approaches to group learning in the language classroom, presenting some principles that are common to any group learning approach, whether it be cooperative learning, student team learning, group investigation, or collaborative learning. The Digest also discusses the Collaborative Learning Model (Reid et al., 1989) which…