The paper describes an innovative treatment approach to severe learning disabilities in use in St. Gallen, Switzerland. The multisensory approach is based on the assumption that learning disabled children have perceptual cognitive deficits. Reality based problem-solvng events connected with tactile-kinesthetic input become the primary foci of…

The development and evaluation of several microcomputer-based strategies designed to facilitate learning how to solve mathematics word problems by personalizing examples in accord with individuals' background and interests are described in this paper. The first of two studies conducted with fifth and sixth grade students to evaluate these…

Education is a process of adapting to change, and the rate of change is especially rapid in science today. This curriculum in human biology is an alternative to the New York State courses in general and Regents biology, and it has been designed to focus on change from the standpoint of the urban student. It is designed to provide students with…

Issues surrounding the statewide competency testing of at-risk students are discussed. Sanctions, such as negative evaluations of educational programs associated with such tests, used to fall most heavily on schools and staff, but tests are increasingly becoming prerequisites for promotion and graduation, with increasing impact on students.…

Black underrepresentation in college enrollment and degree attainment can be seen as symptomatic of broad societal structures that have perpetuated inequality of socioeconomic and educational opportunity. This study examines a low-income black neighborhood to discover the extent to which blacks think of themselves as members of a subordinate caste…

New Jersey's Public School Education Act of 1975 requires local school districts to provide students with "thorough and efficient" educational opportunity. This report describes State initiatives carried out as of April 1986 to help urban districts comply with the act's mandate in the face of the particularly complex and concentrated…

This report describes New Jersey's continuing efforts to help urban school districts comply with the state's Public School Education Act of 1975 in view of the particularly complex problems which the urban districts face in complying with the act's mandate requiring all districts to provide their students with a "thorough and efficient"…

In an attempt to review and, if necessary, update the curriculum, a study investigated the prevalence of problem-solving and design approaches in the teaching of woodworking courses in secondary schools in Zimbabwe. Woodworking classes in forms one and three were studied in an urban secondary school where woodworking is taught up to form four and…

These teacher's materials for a seven-unit course were developed to help students develop technological literacy, career exploration, and problem-solving skills relative to the communication industries. The seven units include an overview of energy and power, principles of energy and power, power production and conversion, power transmission and…

If schools improved the academic performance of at-risk students beginning in the early years and continuing through the elementary grades, this improvement would have multiple positive effects on student dropout, delinquency, pregnancy, substance abuse, and other behaviors. Early improvement of poor academic performance could greatly alleviate…

The radical restructuring of Alaska's public higher education system brought on by the state's 1986 economic collapse is discussed. The plan called for a merger of 11 community colleges with three universities into three multi-campus institutions. It realigned statewide programs in vocational technical education, fisheries and ocean sciences,…

The print and audiovisual materials in this annotated bibliography are divided into three categories: (1) Those in the implementation section (72 items) give reasons for starting a conflict resolution program and ways in which programs improve school climate. There are also materials on establishing and evaluating programs. (2) The skill building…

Court decisions in 1988 expanded the power of school boards to set policies regarding the operation of the public schools. Cases are discussed under the following sections: (1) public school assignment, tuition, transportation, home instruction, and compulsory attendance; (2) private and parochial schools; (3) substantive rights of students,…

The impact of the home learning environment on children's autonomous learning behaviors (ALBs) was examined. The three key topics addressed were: (1) the relation of types of helping techniques used by mothers to their children's help-seeking and persistence behaviors in the classroom; (2) the relation of children's ALBs to gender; and (3)…

A procedure was developed to detect differential item functioning (DIF) in a standardized essay test using the Partial Credit Model, the general polychotomous form of the Rasch model. Using a panel of experts in the writing process, hypothesized explanations for DIF at some score points were developed. Data for the study included averaged…