This document reviews problems related to sexual activity among rural U.S. teenagers, successes and failures of teen sex education programs, and problems and needs specific to rural areas. In a recent poll, 89% of adults favored sex education in the schools and 73% supported making birth control information and contraceptives available in school…

Responses to American College Test College Outcome Measures Program (ACT-COMP) items by 481 black and 9,237 white students at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville) were analyzed using F. Samejima's graded model to determine the level of differential item functioning (DIF). Students had been tested using Form 8 of the ACT-COMP objective test…

This research examined the impact of the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) project on seventh grade students in the year following their ACOT participation in sixth grade. Subjects were 24 former ACOT students and 29 matched control students, all of whom had attended sixth grade at the same school. All subjects were minority students…

During the 2.5 years the project was in operation, the International Center for Culture and Environment (Santa Fe, New Mexico) provided courses concerned with aspects of intercultural communication related to environmental design and planning to students and practitioners from 15 U.S. states and 15 foreign countries. Courses were provided in three…

This five-part report describes George Brown College's Multicultural Demonstration Project (MDP), which was developed to: (1) increase awareness of issues of multicultural change among senior managers at the college; (2) assist two departments to implement aspects of the college's Race and Ethnic Relations Policy and the recommendations of the…

Research has revealed that more males than females participate in computer learning environments. Rural young women in home and school are conditioned to accept outdated role definitions and may be limited in career and life choices by restricted access to technology and their perception of the female role in technology. In 1988-89, a year long…

A contrastive study of Japanese and American English sought to explore how speakers agree and disagree in the two languages. Japanese-speaking college students and American English-speaking teachers of English as a foreign language were informally questioned about food preferences, with their comments surreptitiously recorded for analysis. Results…

The deterioration of industries in rural America in the 1980s has placed rural youth in a difficult situation. Those who remain in rural areas face a scarcity of good jobs, while those who leave face competition for employment against better-educated metropolitan youth. A study was conducted to: (1) examine the educational experiences of both…

This state profile addresses the condition of education in Utah's rural and small schools, placing public schooling and rurality into their social and economic contexts. The "working definition" of "rural" is emphasized, that is, if people served by a school district perceive themselves as rural residents, then the school…

The 'rural' definitions applied by the Federal Government, especially by two data-gathering agencies, the Bureau of the Census and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), emphasize different dimensions of the concept, and delineate the rural-urban continuum in different ways. This report discusses the inconsistency of curent "rural"…

This case report describes a rural Alaska high school teacher's efforts to motivate nine Yup'ik Indian seniors to plan for their futures after high school. The case was written as a training tool to help teaching students to: (1) spot issues and frame problems in complex teaching situations; (2) interpret a situation from different perspectives;…

This casebook was developed collaboratively by a researcher from Far West Laboratory, a staff developer/researcher from the San Francisco Unified School District, and 11 veteran teachers who teach in large metropolitan settings. It contains 14 narrative cases written by teachers about problems that all teachers face who teach ethnically and…

This study first reviews research on factors that influence the ways individuals make decisions, such as the size of an organization and its structure, the nature of the power coalitions within the organization, and certain traits such as risk-taking, self-concept, and gender. The study interviewed 33 administrators at varying levels within six…

This paper describes the Primary Science Project in Norway whose goals were to describe the primary (grades 1-6) science classroom and to make recommendations on improvements for primary science teaching. The purpose of this study was to study the classroom climate, specifically focusing on the social interactions between teachers and students.…

Volunteers (N=83) from paired classes, including Mexican Americans, Anglo Americans, Black Americans and others, visually classified one another in regard to ethnic identity, in an attempt to assess the accuracy of visual identification when used by researchers to achieve such classification. Findings were that major ethnic groups were quite…