Noting that many children in the United States are not well nourished despite the recent economic boom, the state of Maryland began the Maryland Meals for Achievement (MMFA) program, a demonstration project to see if providing a classroom breakfast free to all students can improve student nutrition and academic achievement. This interim report…

This paper describes a survey of teachers trained in Teacher Expectations and Student Achievement (TESA) interactions, a behavior change program based on expectation theory. It teaches 15 interactions by clustering them into five units of three behaviors. Each unit has an interaction designed to improve student academic achievement, provide…

This issue brief discusses the importance of tobacco use cessation efforts for youth. Section 1 discusses the need for tobacco cessation for youth, explaining that despite increased attention to the prevention of tobacco use among youth, there has been little attention to youth who already smoke, and few programs for youth have proven successful.…

In December 1998, faculty from Middle Tennessee State University visited the Faculty of Education at Fukushima University in Fukushima, Japan. The purpose of the visit was to share with Japanese educators the processes through which school counselors are trained to deal with school violence in the United States. Because school staffing patterns…

The attainment of a cultural identity is a major challenge of social development for many children from minority groups in today's fast-changing multicultural societies. Culturo-metrics is a new area of research that teachers and researchers can use to measure cultural identity and to explore culturally preferred behaviors of children and teachers…

Challenging behaviors range from disobedience to outright physical violence in the school setting. A variety of different terms are used to describe these behaviors, including "antisocial behavior, aggression, bad behavior, difficult behavior, and problem behavior." The term "challenging behavior" was chosen for this paper…

This study evaluated how college students reacted to an Early Alert notice about their grades. Undergraduate students in 19 specific courses were sent a notice if they were receiving a C minus or below at the 5-week point of the semester. The study investigated whether students who received the notice actually performed better than did control…

This 25-minute videotape briefly describes the current condition of many of England's secondary school grounds and shows what can be done to improve them. Empowering students to help in redesigning the surrounding school grounds into a conservation area is described. Examples are provided showing how grounds influence student social relations;…

Previous research on small-group collaboration identifies several behaviors that significantly predict student learning. These reports focus on student behavior to understand why, for example, large numbers of students are unsuccessful in obtaining explanations or applying help received, leaving unexplored the role that teachers play in …

Although afterschool programs for children have been operating for many years in some communities, the afterschool movement, the great national awakening to the opportunity afterschool offers, is just a few years old. As public demand for afterschool has grown, so also has the demand for accountability. That is particularly true in programs…

A review of the critical literature provides a brief history of systematic observation of classroom behaviors, long valued as an important data collection method in educational research. Milestones in systematic observation of classrooms are traced back to 1914 and the development and use of the Special Strategies Observation System (SSOS) through…

Current theories of learning have emphasized the value of dialogue for student engagement and achievement (Cazden, 2001; Bruffee, 1992). Research has also shown that the nature of classroom discourse depends greatly on the teacher (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, W., 2001). These issues are relatively well understood in face-to-face…

The secondary school counselor, as quasi-ombudsman, differentiates between the role of counselor as consultant (where the counselor's primary task is to aid the individual to develop strength to resolve personal difficulties himself) and role of counselor as ombudsman (where the counselor can go over the head of a recalcitrant teacher to correct…

Study results show that most citizens did not consider a week-long campus disturbance to be a legitimate form of social protest and that their attitudes toward campus dissent were related to attitudes toward campus freedom of expression and beliefs about campus life. (Author)

This study, which attempts to evaluate the assessment of various forms of social behavior by teachers and college students, is an extension of an earlier investigation (Stanton 1973). (Author)