Students are adjusting to higher expectations this year as a struggling West Louisville high school works to change course. Teachers at the West Louisville high school, now named The Academy @ Shawnee, have a daunting task: reversing the fortunes of one of Kentucky's lowest-performing schools. The school is one of 10 identified last spring as the…

Much talk about equity in education is about bricks and mortar--about having equal facilities and equal resources. Those factors, although extremely important, are relatively easy to quantify. What may be harder to capture are the beliefs that administrators, teachers, and students hold--beliefs that can have a striking impact on students'…

Purpose: The two-year basic training course leading to the Basic Federal Certificate was established in Switzerland by the new Vocational Training Act in 2002 with the intention of ensuring upper secondary education and training for disadvantaged young people. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the findings of a longitudinal study of youths…

Bullying can be a serious and damaging experience for students today. The children who bully are more likely to be truant; drop out of school; or engage in alcohol, tobacco, or other drug abuse, and children who are bullied are more likely to experience depression, low self-esteem, health problems, poor grades, and suicidal thoughts. In addition,…

In the spring of 2007, Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana made the first call. Gov. Kathleen Blanco made the next call. And Louisiana's state superintendent of schools, Paul Pastorek, made the final pitch. The trio wanted to know if Paul Vallas, the renowned CEO of the School District of Philadelphia, would make a move to New Orleans to oversee the…

In this contribution to the Widening Participation Special Issue of Psychology Teaching Review we consider our experiences in education as people who can't spell using an auto-ethnographic methodology (Sparkes, 2007), specifically, evocative auto-ethnography (Anderson, 2006) and guided by a social constructionist approach to identity (Burr, 1995).…

I analyse low and high achieving children's competences regarding pattern and structure at the beginning of formal schooling comparatively. The aim is to evaluate the range of school starters' early structure sense. The results suggest overall high pre-instructional competences which, however, differ strongly between the mathematical high and low…

This dissertation grows from a concern that the current public school accountability model, designed ostensibly to increase achievement in lower-performing schools, may be creating unidentified negative consequences for teachers and students within those schools. This hermeneutical phenomenological study features the perceptions of seventeen…

The researcher examined the academic performance of low-tracked students (n = 156) using standardized math test scores to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference in achievement depending on academic environment, tracked or nontracked. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was calculated, using a paired samples t-test for a…

Many learning, behavioural and developmental problems can limit students' abilities to respond adequately to the school's curriculum. School personnel often join with colleagues, including school psychologists, to assist students in resolving these problems. This presentation describes a model program in which school psychologists and others…

The Federal government has brought the issue of low-performing schools to the forefront of public conversation by committing $3.5 billion over three years to turn around these schools. As of March 2011, over 1200 schools across the country had been awarded School Improvement Grants (SIG). Given the magnitude of this short-term investment and the…

Variability in achievement across learners is a hallmark of second language (L2) learning, especially in academic-based learning. The Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), based on a large, population-representative sample in the United Kingdom, provides the first opportunity to examine individual differences in second language achievement in a…

We investigated whether being poorly skilled in reading contributes to children's reported feelings of anger, distractibility, anxiety, sadness, loneliness, and social isolation. Data were analyzed from a longitudinal subsample of children (N = 3,308) participating in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. Multilevel logistic…

The purpose of this study was to explore the role of students' use of writing strategies in light of their English writing achievements in Taiwan. This research used a cognitive approach to examine the process of writing. Forty student writers (including 20 low and 20 high achievers) in Taiwan participated in this study. Strategies used for…

The authors explored the moderating effect of teachers' expectancies and general sense of efficacy on the relationship between students' achievement and their cognitive engagement and achievement 1 year later. They used hierarchical linear modeling with a longitudinal sample of 79 mathematics teachers and their 1,364 secondary school students…