Secondary vocational-technical education programs in Mississippi are faced with many challenges resulting from sweeping educational reforms at the national and state levels. Schools and teachers are increasingly being held accountable for providing true learning activities to every student in the classroom. This accountability is measured through…

Through a rigorous process of selecting educational psychology's most useful affective constructs, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) constructed the Students' Approaches to Learning (SAL) instrument, which requires only 10 min to measure 14 factors that assess self-regulated learning strategies, self-beliefs,…

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) technologies are becoming increasingly important components of online educational environments (Romiszowski & Mason, 2004). The online discussion forum that is a significant component of many web-based courses is one type of CMC. Instructors and students rely on these asynchronous forums to engage one another…

This paper describes the long-term effects of a staff-development program, "Dealing with Multi-Grade Classes," based on selected findings from teaching-effectiveness research in schools with multi-grade or mixed-age classes. The short-term effects were examined in two studies conducted in 1986-87 and 1989-90. In 1992 a follow-up study…

At the end of the 1992-93 school year, Dutch schools finished their preparations for a new core curriculum for the first stage of secondary education. One of the problems teachers faced in implementing this curriculum was the problem of class heterogeneity. How teachers dealt with heterogeneity was studied through an examination of the use of…

The Education Council Act of 1991 established the National Education Commission on Time and Learning as an independent advisory body and called for a comprehensive review of the relationship between time and learning in U.S. schools. This document serves as a supplementary volume to the commission's first report released in May 1994, which found…

This publication offers suggestions for making more productive use of time, a scarce and valued educational resource. The chapter authors, authorities on the use of educational time, write about how to extend and enhance learning time within and outside schools. In "Productive Use of Time," Herbert Walberg describes how learning time can be…

While past research has reported moderate effects of learning-to-learn courses on grade-point averages (GPAs), number of hours completed, and attrition rates, little has been reported about how students fare in subsequent semesters. This study, which consisted of a five-phase interview process with 30 randomly selected male and female college…

This practicum developed a self-recording procedure as a strategy for increasing on-task behavior, academic achievement, and self-esteem of 12 students (grades 6 to 8) with emotional disabilities in a self-contained class over a 12-week period. Students were taught to self-record at gradually decreasing frequencies as well to use their judgment in…

Three elementary-age students with severe disabilities were moved from a special education class to an integrated (chronological age-appropriate regular education) classroom. The intervention resulted in substantial reductions in challenging behavior along with simultaneous increases in appropriate task-related and social behavior for all three…

A quasi-experimental, treatment-control group investigation was designed to test the effects on Dutch primary school teachers of the staff development program "Dealing with Mixed-Age Classes." Research findings from mixed-age classes, effective teaching, and classroom management and organization were translated into teaching behaviors.…

Detroit's Peer Teachers as Mirrors and Monitors Project is intended to validate cost effective methods for increasing Academic Learning Time (ALT) for students in grades one through four. A major problem in this research effort has been the design of valid and reliable measures of the components of ALT. One very important component of ALT is…

A study was conducted to determine how 11,400 minutes were spent by 186 students in 10 classes in three secondary vocational education program areas (agricultural education, marketing and distributive education, and trade and industrial education) in seven high schools and area vocational schools in four states. The study attempted to find out how…

Recent advances in instructional knowledge, as well as their usefulness for fitting instructional strategies to individual students, are the subject of this four-chapter survey of research literature. Chapter 1 summarizes research on learning styles--the ways in which individuals perceive, analyze, interpret, and respond to learning situations.…

This document is the complete Indicators of Quality Schools assessment instrument. The instrument is a series of checklists of school practices found in schools known to have an effective instructional program organized under 12 topic areas (with subitems listed under each area): curricular congruence; assessment; leadership of the principal; high…