In an attempt to deal with teenage pregnancy, the Owensboro, Kentucky, City School System operated the Teenage Parent Program, an inner-city program for pregnant teenagers from all schools in Daviess County. A "Coping Skills Project" was designed to enhance this program by improving parenting attitudes and skills, increasing career…

This background paper on refugee needs assessment discusses the assumptions, goals, objectives, strategies, models, and methods that the state refugee programs can consider in designing their strategies for assessing the mental health needs of refugees. It begins with a set of background assumptions about the ethnic profile of recent refugee…

A study focused on teachers' developing knowledge about their work, particularly the thinking of eight elementary school teachers from a racially mixed San Francisco Bay Area school district about the use of literature contracts in the classroom. The study examined ways in which teachers' prior beliefs influence their use of a new teaching…

Black students, other minorities and white students can show significant increases in achievement in biology by using a cooperative learning model. Concentrating on cooperating with group members toward a common goal is the ingredient that makes this cooperative learning model work. This study was designed to investigate the effects of cooperative…

The model and instrument presented in this report were developed by the National Alliance of Community and Technical Colleges (NACTC) and the National Center for Research in Vocational Education for measuring a college's performance in terms of external demands and its own stated mission. Part I of the report describes the development of the…

Arguing that retention research requires a sound theoretical framework and that retention planning takes place within a sociopolitical context, this paper presents an overview of the requirements and process of student retention research. Part I examines the role of research in a college's retention effort and establishes the general requirements…

Project Advancement Based on Competency (ABC) was a 5-year study funded jointly by the Alberta Department of Education and the Calgary Board of Education for the sum of $999,950. The study extended from 1982 to 1987, exploring alternatives to the Carnegie Unit in three senior high schools in Calgary. The Unit was established in 1907 to regulate…

This report describes the development and validation of the Test of Inference Ability in Reading Comprehension: a scaled-answer, multiple-choice test intended for use in Grades 6, 7, and 8. The report discusses the need for and conceptualization of assessment of inference ability; proposes standards and principles of inference appraisal; and…

This report focuses on the state-supported Undergraduate Writing Program at Illinois State University (ISU). Several innovations have contributed to the expansion and improvement of ISU's Undergraduate Writing Program, whose key components are: the Writing-across-the-Curriculum Program in the College of Arts and Sciences; the use of microcomputers…

The Coppin Critical Reading Project at Coppin State College, Maryland is designed to help undergraduate students to become critical readers across a wide range of disciplines through the introduction of significant texts into the general education curriculum, through analysis of these texts from the perspective of the humanities, and through…

The Community Action Volunteers in Education (CAVE), which is described in this report, is a co-curricular learning, non-profit agency offering over 16 programs to children, the elderly, special populations, and low-income residents in the Chico, California, area and in three state institutions in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys. Based at California…

This paper discusses the major components of Project Success, a nationally recognized learning disabilities (LD) support program on the campus of the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Its goals include: each student will become academically and socially independent; each student will graduate from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh or some other…

Classroom dialogue is an important influence on students' learning, making the structure and content of dialogue important research variables. An analysis of two sample classroom dialogues using the Thematic and Structural Analysis (TSA) Technique shows a positive correlation between the quality of dialogue structure and the level of student…

Project COMPETE (Community-based Model for Public School Exit and Transition to Employment) was a federally funded service demonstration project to investigate new procedures for secondary education and transition services for youth with moderate, severe, and profound mental retardation. The goal of Project COMPETE was to develop and validate a…

Instructional leadership studies are plentiful but have many shortcomings, including lack of definition of key variables, problems of causality, overrepresentation of exemplary schools, and lack of validity and reliability in research design and implementation. Definitions of "leadership" and "instruction" are needed. There is…