This series of booklets is intended for parents and children to share, reading the booklets together as they listen to the companion tape for each booklet. Each booklet (focusing on a particular topic) answers practical questions from parents, describes activities that can be used at home, notes some books for parents and children, and contains…

A longitudinal study called The Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development examined the relationships between the kinds of talk that children experience at home and school at ages 3 and 4 and measures of literate abilities at age 5. Subjects, 87 children in 2 cohorts of 42 and 45 children from low-income families living in the Boston,…

This newsletter presents five articles focusing on the social development of infants and very young children. The first article, "Sympathetic Behavior in Very Young Children," by Lois Barclay Murphy, gives examples of early sympathetic behavior, traces the development of sympathy, identifies individual patterns of sympathetic response,…

This digest presents summary statistics addressing the following questions: (1) "How are children with disabilities defined?" (2) "Who are the students served?" (3) "Where are these students receiving their special education?" and (4) "How many teachers are needed?" The digest also examines past and present…

This report describes an ongoing longitudinal study in Kauai (Hawaii) begun in 1955, which is following the course of all births to adulthood and assessing the long-term consequences of perinatal complications and adverse child-rearing conditions. Specifically reported is a subset of data on 22 children (diagnosed as having learning disabilities…

Using linked individual and census tract data from the 1980 U.S. Census, it is found that when a teenage boy drops out of school depends not only on his family background and the increase in earnings associated with graduating, but also on the characteristics of the neighborhood in which he lives. Both the good and bad dimensions of neighborhood…

The Task Force on Enrollment Growth Planning (TFEGP), authorized in 1992 by the State Board of Directors for Community Colleges (SBDCC) of Arizona, includes representatives from each community college as well as staff from SBDCC office. The Task Force was created to prepare enrollment growth estimates for community colleges through the year 2010;…

Thirteen papers explore the African American experience of poverty and ghetto formation; forces shaping contemporary urban poverty; and mobility and family strategies among groups differentiated by ethnicity, race, and labor market position. The introduction, "The Urban 'Underclass' as a Metaphor of Social Transformation" (M. B. Katz),…

There is no national policy on assisting drug-using pregnant mothers nor on the children they produce. This paper looks at the issue of "crack-cocaine" and mothers who give birth to children after using drugs during pregnancy. It attempts to lay out what is known, and it puts forth "best guesses" regarding helping children born…

Several trends are significantly affecting the early childhood education field, with the major accomplishment of crystallizing the scope of early childhood education as birth through 8 years of age. These trends and innovations include the following: (1) restructuring early childhood education programs, by introducing formal schooling,…

This document presents a framework for teaching language, literacy, and numeracy as the central elements of competence for work and social activity in Australia. The framework contains guidelines that set the overall agenda for curriculum and assessment, with which the needs of workplaces, educational institutions, and community groups can be…

Intended for use in training staff concerned with building bridges between the family learning environment and Head Start, this guide broadens the idea of "parents as teachers" beyond the instructional role parents play, by looking at the entire family learning environment. Following an introductory section, the guide presents four…

A project was conducted to examine the impact of vocational education and training (VET) research on decision making in VET in Australia. Data were collected from the following: a literature review; a symposium attended by state-, territory-, and national-level VET policymakers and planners and VET providers; semistructured telephone interviews…

The September 1998 topical bibliographies and analyses in this collection cover the latest ERIC literature on community colleges in eleven key areas: (1) access, diversity, and inclusion; (2) civil society; (3) teaching and learning; (4) faculty; (5) technology; (6) governance; (7) leadership; (8) finance; (9) market forces; (10) change; and (11)…

This paper examines constructs of school violence among 11 teachers in a large urban secondary school and a large rural district high school. It describes how these teachers contextualize their particular schools, and explores contradictions between teachers' constructions of violence in schools in general and their particular constructions of…