A study of West Virginia elementary schools examined why similar types of elementary students differ greatly in academic achievement. In the first phase of the study, a comparison of 33 high- and 33 low-achieving elementary schools in West Virginia found that low-achieving schools had 2.5 times more low-income students than high-achieving schools,…

School reform in the 1990s has been focused on school-based restructuring, with local efforts shown to be more successful than earlier central or remote control approaches. Success has followed changes in teachers' classroom behavior, in the structure of the school, and its school culture. The local school restructuring approach is illustrated…

This book contains abridged and edited versions of research reports with original commentary that were previously published elsewhere. The articles reflect J. Dewey's notion that schools must prepare children to be effective members of a democracy and that life in a heterogeneous society requires cultural flexibility and cooperation that must be…

Some researchers have argued that out-of-school curricula, implicit patterns of learning in such realms as families, homes, peer groups, mass media, and nonschool organizations, are instrumental in forging the outlooks of individuals. This paper presents a way in which educators can learn about the out-of-school curricula of their students. The…

The progress of a novice ethnographic researcher is traced from problems associated with a pilot study through the production of a final draft of her dissertation--an observational case study. Focus is on the data analysis process, the development of conceptual maps leading to an emergent grounded theory, and writing the dissertation. Research…

This paper develops the idea of "the authority of experience" to explain the unease about teacher education represented in comments of 19 graduate students enrolled in a preservice physics education methods course which combined on-campus classes and teaching placements. Interviews with the student teachers after the first half of the…

This paper describes an inservice teacher education project entitled "Educating the Low Achieving Child in the Regular Classroom" offered to Christian-oriented nonpublic urban schools that are committed to mainstreaming children with learning differences. The project provided training to increase teachers' flexibility and ability to…

This document reports on the work of a task force charged with formulating recommendations on the kind of preparation an incoming student should have to assure successful entry to and completion of the freshman year of study at the State University of New York (SUNY). In addition, the task force was asked to specify what program of study and forms…

This book addresses the needs of college and university instructors for an integrative, comprehensive approach to teaching and learning in higher education. The book has two purposes: first, to place teaching and learning in higher education within a theoretical framework, and second, to provide practical strategies for teaching. The introductory…

This essay explores the roots and implications of stance, which helps examine the daily practice of educating new teachers. Stance is about the positioning involved in teaching. It depends on a postmodern view of reality as being situational and interpreted, rather than fixed and predefined. In literacy education, a reader's relationship to text…

This report examines factors contributing to grade repetition in rural elementary schools in Honduras. Forty schools in four Honduran departments were randomly selected from lists of schools with the highest and lowest repetition rates. Subjects were 1,854 students in Grade 1 or 3 during the 1990 school year who were still in the school in March…

This study used a triangulated methodology involving ethnographic interviews, opinionnaires, and rank ordering of student concerns to discover variables that impacted student teachers as they passed through developmental stages. Data collected from interviews with five elementary student teachers were used to discover a developmental theory of…

Societal changes of the past three decades call for a fundamental change in the structure of the educational system and in the culture of schooling. Disadvantaged African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos, in particular, historically have suffered from the cultural misalignment of home, school, and community. The reform of educational…

To prepare teachers for working with diverse student populations, teacher education reform must advance from a course in multicultural education to the level of an organized and integrated component of the teacher education curriculum. This roundtable discussion identifies the major principles at issue in bringing about such a change in the…

To explore the suggestion that subjects modulate their reading strategies in accordance with how they expect to be tested, several test expectancies (multiple-choice, true/false, essay, and cloze) were implemented in addition to a non-specific test expectancy as a control. Subjects were 124 students at Purdue University (Indiana). After reading…