Consists of three sections bound together by a common theme and reference list. The first section, by Gail Burnaford, addresses teacher action research as essential for motivating students and giving teachers a voice in curriculum. Section 2, by James Beane, explores common assumptions behind action research and integrative curriculum. Section 3,…

Although one national goal proposes that all Americans will have all knowledge necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise citizenship responsibility, others fail to explain how children incarcerated in standards-driven schools will make sense of the world. The microsociety school approach radically recontextualizes in-school learning by…

This article promotes the use of contextual constructionism in evaluation research. The call for truth in sentencing in Tennessee (and across the country) is used to illustrate the conflict among stakeholders that arises from program evaluation and to show how their multiple realities make a contextual constructionist approach pertinent. (SLD)

The consistency, if any, with which force concepts are used by individual students in different, but closely related, contexts was investigated. A total of 534 university and high school students were tested to elicit their beliefs about the forces acting on various objects. Students' beliefs about the forces acting on objects at rest and in…

Analyzed the situational specificity of the differential development of inhibition in three social settings. Inhibition toward strangers was stable during the preschool and kindergarten years, even for an unselected sample of children. Inhibition toward peers showed a lower stability over the same age period, indicating differential and…

Debunks eight misconceptions concerning U.S.'s alleged "lavish" spending on education in comparison to other countries. The share-of-national-income approach and measures of per pupil spending are frequently misinterpreted and often exclude education need and education resource cost. Nations with an expensive, highly productive labor…

Describes a model of adaptation to the environment across the life span. Proposes that an individual's performance in an activity is affected not only by cognitive capacity but also by perceptions and definitions of the activity. Empirical support for the model, based on a survey of individuals' everyday experiences and on laboratory studies, is…

Epistemological beliefs of 146 male and 252 female university students were examined as a function of their educational level and field of study. Epistemological beliefs can be represented in terms of five factors. Students' beliefs about learning are a product of the activity, the culture, and the context. (SLD)

Summarizes 11 themes of Deloria's "Indian Education in America," including Native versus Western worldview; history of Indian education; Indian versus professional identity; community as key to survival; destructive aspects of American education; necessity of tribal context for education and knowledge; and reconciliation of science and…

Although "climate" has become a part of teachers' everyday language, it is a devious metaphor. An interactive model of school culture (with both covert and overt dimensions) is a more useful concept that could help teachers develop a deeper understanding of school context while reducing their manipulation by researchers. (30 references) (MLH)

This rejoinder to several commentaries on a paper (EC 231 901) on the theory-practice relationship in the care and education of mentally retarded individuals discusses the degree to which setting is the service versus a part of the service, differences between researchers and practitioners, and the role of science and scientists. (JDD)

Explores relationship between text and context in pragmatism that is related to differences between pragmatism and scientific realism, as identified by Ernest R. House (1992) and repeated by Jim Garrison, and considers association between pragmatism and aesthetics. Comments concerning pragmatism and educational reform are made by suggesting how…

Whether specific motivational traits (social concern, goal directedness, self-reliance, external and intrinsic qualities, and task involvement) are related to gender, race, and religion was studied for 74 New Jersey educators. Gender differences in motivation are not found, but racial differences for some variables are discussed. (SLD)

Michael Polanyi's 1958 book "Personal Knowledge" explains how models and world views form the core of human life. The paradigmatic context in which today's schools function derives from an outmoded 19th-century agrarian economy. The new millennium context turns around the explosion of information technologies and the globalization of…

Data from 4 experiments in which 136 college students read a situation description and took the perspective of an uninformed addressee to determine whether a speaker was sarcastic suggest that readers use perspective-irrelevant information. The finding poses a problem for theories of language that assume the use of only relevant information. (SLD)