Three big-city districts--Chicago, Milwaukee, and New York--have terminated federal grants aimed at promoting performance-based compensation plans and professional development for teachers and principals. Overall, the 2010 Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grants to the three districts would have provided an $88 million payout over five years--nearly 7…

Twenty-four free-response questions were developed to explore introductory college astronomy students' understanding of gravity in a variety of contexts, including in and around Earth, throughout the solar system, and in hypothetical situations. Questions were separated into three questionnaires, each of which was given to a section of…

John Muir Elementary School in San Francisco is like countless other schools in cities across the United States. The student body comprises mostly lower income, African American and Latino students who--despite being just as intelligent as their white and Asian counterparts--traditionally underachieve on many academic measures. Talented,…

Teacher leadership has gained attention in recent years as a plausible means by which educational reform and instructional improvement can be accomplished through ongoing, site-based professional development for teachers. This article reviews and draws conclusions across the research literature on professional development and teacher leadership to…

The implementation of quality assurance (QA) is one of the most challenging reform areas for Turkey due to the unique organization of its higher education system. This paper explores the development of QA systems in Turkish universities. Using a qualitative case study approach, the authors examine how Turkey accomplishes the goal of implementing…

Throughout the evolution of education, various methods of teacher training have emerged to provide general professional development to educators. After trial and error, forms of coaching, including peer coaching, emerged as one of several operational training tools and has been a recommended method of teacher development in recent years (Cotabish…

In 2004, the University of Kansas (KU) launched an interdisciplinary Graduate Writing Program as part of a larger initiative to reduce time to degree rates and increase degree completion rates. Serving both domestic and international students, this program employs a rhetorical genre-based approach in a series of courses organized around the genres…

The researcher for this evaluative study investigated the efficacy and impact of the iStartSmart college success course by examining the first-term retention, fall-to-fall persistence, and three-year completion rates of community college students who enrolled in the one- or three-credit course at a community college in Arizona and the rates of…

The University of Southern Queensland's Centre for Further Education and Training, which offers distance teaching and training courses to a wide range of mature students, developed a quality assurance framework to guide its efforts to improve the quality of its distance courses for teachers and trainers with little or no training in educational…

A study summarized the activities of two advisory bodies--the Program Advisory Committees (PACs) and Trade Advisory Boards (TABs)--at Saskatchewan Institute of Applied Science and Technology (SIAST). Minutes from all meetings were collected, reviewed, and analyzed according to the main areas of concern for the advisory committees:…

In 1992, a nationwide poll of active forensics programs concluded with an open ended question of how to increase participation in NDT (National Debate Tournament) debate that yielded four goals. The first goal, re-emphasizing communication skills, arose because NDT has emphasized rapid delivery above all else. NDT needs to be more entertaining to…

This paper argues that parliamentary debate provides a meaningful alternative for programs looking to offer debate components in their mission. The most important assumption in the paper is that comprehensive programs are valuable educational laboratories and require debate activities as part of their comprehensiveness; in fact, the comprehensive…

The Job Training Reform Act Amendments were introduced in the House of Representatives to amend the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) to improve the delivery of services to hard-to-serve youth and adults and for other purposes. This report summarizes this proposed legislation, which was recommended for passage by the Committee on Education and…

This ERIC Digest provides basic information about school-age day care programs. Discussion focuses briefly on options available to families with school-age children, developmental needs of school-age children, characteristics of high quality school-age programs, supportive services for self-care, and ways of improving school-age child care…

Improving the inferior image that marketing education has developed can only be accomplished through the professionalism and dedication of each marketing education teacher and through efforts of marketing officials to upgrade program quality at every level. Eight suggestions are offered to stimulate ideas: (1) get students involved in fund-raising…