The high dropout rate in urban high schools, particularly among poor and racial minority youth, continues to be a vexing problem confronting public education in the U.S. Although much research and many prevention efforts have been devoted to this issue, dropout rates continue to soar. In this article, the authors present a case study analysis of…

School violence is a subject of great public and media interest that has stimulated a comprehensive body of research. Academic consideration of the subject began in the USA and Scandinavia in the mid-1960s and early 1970s but little evidence could be found of publications on the subject in the small landlocked Kingdom of Lesotho. To address this…

The purpose of this study was to understand factors that influenced the career trajectories of veteran urban secondary physical education teachers. The careers of these teachers were studied from the theoretical perspectives of teacher efficacy and teacher career development. Participants included 9 secondary urban physical education teachers (4…

Adapting training methods to specific teacher traits to best facilitate the training effects for preservice teachers is an important, yet neglected, topic in aptitude-treatment interaction research. This study investigated interactions between four personal traits (CT-dispositions, thinking styles, CT-skills, and intrapersonal intelligence) and…

The treatment of errors in mathematics classrooms has gained attention in recent years, with many researchers suggesting that errors should be used as starting points for student inquiry into mathematics. In the study reported in this article, we examined how teachers used discourse around errors to generate inquiry by looking at the treatment of…

During their teaching program, pre-service teachers participated in a course concerning teaching in the heterogeneous classroom. As an introduction to the issue of "gifted children," the pre-service teachers were given an assignment: (1) to interview gifted children (identified as gifted by the Ministry of Education, according to IQ…

Background: Two goal perspectives predominate in achievement settings such as physical education (PE), namely task involvement, focused on self-referenced effort and improvement, and ego involvement, focused on normative ability comparisons. A task (mastery) involving motivational climate is associated with adaptive motivational responses, whereas…

A study which replicated previous research focused on the perceived affiliative communication behaviors of teachers within the classroom, their relationship to student learning, and the interrelationship among those behaviors. Six hypotheses were formulated based on already published literature. These hypotheses suggest that student perceptions of…

No trend in education has been more exalted than "whole language," which has a following of teachers, researchers, and specialists who are almost fanatical in their observance of this teaching method. The debate is between two types of direct instruction: the "atomistic" approach encourages teachers to break down reading into…

This paper reports on one secondary social studies teacher's efforts to engage students in learning about self, others, and the world. Modes of presentation and learning activities are the specific focus. Observations occurred during 160 class periods in four different social studies classrooms, tenth-grade world geography, eleventh-grade U.S.…

Participants in this study of the effect of year round schools on teacher attendance included 45 elementary school teachers from a Chicago (Illinois) public school located in a predominately low socioeconomic neighborhood comprised of 98 percent Hispanic students. These teachers were part of the staff when the school was on a traditional calendar…

This study analyzed how Taiwanese kindergarten teachers evaluated events of various classroom management skills used by early childhood student teachers in group activities. The kindergarten teachers evaluated effectiveness, appropriateness, frequency of practicing similar skills themselves, and the need to modify any of the above. A questionnaire…

Research has shown that teacher involvement can stimulate and enrich children's play, with positive developmental consequences. This study examined teachers' thinking and practices in relation to the role of the teacher in children's outdoor play. Data were collected from eight preschools through teacher interviews and observations of children's…

Great theoretical debate has occurred in whether a teacher not of the same biological origin of the author of a text can do justice to the literature of another ethnic or racial group in the class. However, mainstream public university students of largely white populations feel themselves "indoctrinated" in classrooms which have the aim…

Based on a participant observation study of a full-day kindergarten in a North Carolina public school in 1994, this report argues that instructional transitions or classroom rituals act as rites of passage enabling children to disengage from their home roles, transition to school roles, and assume the moral identity of the student role. Portal…