A group of seven Japanese-language Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) testers licensed by the American Council on the Teaching of foreign Languages (ACTFL) conducted research related to ACTFL-OPI criteria. They first examined 24 audiotaped interview tests to see what kind of consistency there would be when individual testers applied general criteria…

This report describes activities of a one-year, federally supported project at the University of Guam to survey public school and university needs in dealing with a multicultural student population. Local and regional educational professionals (teachers, faculty, administrators) and students were interviewed regarding their views on the region's…

This paper reports on the development and utilization of the professional portfolio in the University of San Francisco's (California) teacher education program. It reviews the rationale and guidelines for using this performance-based teacher assessment model, reports the results of a survey of 45 recent credential program graduates' use of the…

This book reports on several studies of the attitudes of college students in the 1990s, tracing the differences which have developed in the last decade. A representative sample of 9,100 undergraduates was surveyed in 1993, and interviews and small focus groups were conducted with student body presidents, student newspaper editors, and student…

The National Household Education Survey (NHES) is a data collection system of the National Center for Education Statistics that collects and publishes data on the condition of education in the United States. It is a telephone survey of the noninstitutionalized population of the country, and it focuses on issues that are best studied through…

The comparison of adult literacy in the United States and in other countries is based on data gathered in interviews with a sample of individuals representative of the population aged 16-65 in twelve countries: Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Switzerland,…

This case study of an historian high school history teacher is an account of how differing views of the nature of history and historical knowledge influenced the teacher's teaching practice. The two discourse communities the teacher belonged to, that of the university where the degree was granted and that of the school community in which the…

The traditional K-3 social studies curriculum has focused on food, clothing, shelter, communication, transportation, and other cultural universals. Little information exists about children's prior knowledge and thinking (including misconceptions) about these topics. This study was designed to provide such information with respect to the topic of…

The way in which children's transition to primary school is managed can set the stage not only for children's school success, but also their response to future transitions. This study examined transition experiences of young children, their families, and their early childhood and primary school teachers, by means of interviews and detailed…

In an effort to apply traditional instructional design theories to World Wide Web course development, this qualitative research study examined experiences in Web course design and delivery and explored what components affected Web-based course design. The purpose of the study was to identify and document instructional design attributes of the Web…

The Minorities and Communication Division of the proceedings contains the following 6 papers: "Can We Talk? Racial Discourse as a Community-Building Paradigm for Journalists" (Meta G. Carstarphen); "Can Cross Burning Be Constitutionally Proscribed?: Sixty Years of Hate Speech Rulings Culminating in 'Black v. Virginia'" (Roxanne…

Noting the need to develop strategies to ease the transition of children from families recently arriving in the United States from Gambia into the public school system in New York City, this paper compares the school life in Gambia with that of Bronx, New York. Information on school life in Gambia was obtained through literature and through…

Family connections, traditional activities, educational goals, and fatalism are themes running throughout research and published observations about Appalachia. Information from 3 days of interviews with the author's grandmother, an 87-year-old Appalachian woman, is compared to these common research themes. The interviewee's experiences concerning…

This paper examines the effect of foreign language instruction on middle school students' attitudes toward "the other." The primary purpose of this case study is to describe the process of culture learning as it takes place within a middle school foreign language program. Culture learning is a particular type of human learning related to the…

This paper considers the influence of the values and the discourse behaviors of the native-speaking assessor as interlocutor. These variables in the assessments of oral proficiency interrelate in complex ways with features of test design such as tasks, prompts, topics, guidelines, and assessor training. This paper reviews some previous studies,…