This study investigated the impact of learning communities on the academic success of university students at-risk of academic failure. The effects of learning communities (LC) at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) on cumulative GPAs, retention rates, and earned cumulative hours of students with ACT sub-scores of 17 or 18 in math who were…

State Compensatory Education (SCE) is a supplemental program designed to eliminate disparities in (a) student performance on assessment instruments administered under chapter 39 of the Texas Education Code (1995, amended 2007), and (b) the rates of high school completion between students who are at risk of dropping out of school, as defined by…

The literature exploring commonalities between four-year and community college student alcohol use is relatively scarce. A possible reason for this discrepancy is the heavy focus on alcohol issues at university colleges. Coll (1999) presented one of the first brief assessments comparing community and four-year colleges on alcohol use and related…

Working at an alternative school requires the ability to balance a plethora of complicated issues. The primary focus is how to give high-risk students, who have spent years developing a suspicion for education and educators, a chance to be successful in life. The second focus, and just as important, is creating a group of educators who have the…

In implementing its Behavior Research Initiative, the U.S. Department of Education funded four Behavior Research Centers, each to test the efficacy of a separate intervention to improve the behavior of elementary school students with or at risk for serious behavior problems. The initiative also established the National Behavior Research…

This study explored the responsiveness of children at risk of reading problems in Year 1 to a phonics intervention delivered by teaching assistants (TAs). Based on their non-word decoding skills in the immediate post-tests, 74 children were clustered together at the high end as "treatment responders" (n = 49) and at the low end as "treatment…

In this study, the question was raised how basic cognitive processes are related to math abilities and how it can be best determined which children are at risk for developing those disabilities. The role of four distinct basic processes in the development of early mathematics was investigated: executive functions, fluid intelligence, subitizing,…

Attending university is a pleasurable experience for many students. Yet for others it represents a highly stressful time of extensive studying and pressure to meet the requirements of academia. Academic stress is associated with a variety of negative outcomes such as physical illness and deteriorating mental health. This paper explores the…

This study examined the association between cigarette smoking and dieting behaviors and trends in that association among US adolescents in grades 9-12 between 1999 and 2007. Youth Risk Behavior Survey datasets were analyzed using the multivariable logistic regression method. The sample size of each survey year ranged from 13,554 to 15,273 with…

We examined associations between children's health status and the quality of their peer relationships, as well as factors that may account for individual variation in the quality of chronically ill and healthy children's peer relationships. Our sample included 268 children (138 boys; 130 girls) with 149 European-Americans and 119…

Using a mail survey and face-to-face interviews, this study explored educators' use of and perceptions about DIBELS, a widely used reading assessment and intervention instrument. Analysis included tabulations and a conceptual analysis of extended responses. Most frequent uses for DIBELS included identification of at-risk students, intervention…

Purpose: This study examined 2 schedules of treatment for phonemic awareness. Method: Forty-one 5- to 6-year-old kindergartners, including 22 English learners, with low letter-name and first-sound knowledge received 11 hr of phonemic awareness treatment: concentrated (CP, 3x/wk to December), dispersed (DP, 1x/wk to March), and dispersed vocabulary…

It is argued that algebra is a gateway to a rich high school curriculum and later success at a four-year college. Therefore, everyone should take algebra and take it as early as possible. In this article, the author contends that it is a fallacious argument that infers causation from correlation. He believes that the kids who take algebra early…

One of the main problems faced by several educational systems around the world is educational exclusion. Portugal is no exception. It is recognized that those who drop out of education are at risk of social exclusion, with reduced opportunities to participate in society. In order to understand this, the authors reconceptualized the school as a…

This study tested the hypotheses that (a) persistent language difficulties during childhood would predict lower school readiness and (b) language difficulties present just prior to school entry would predict lower school readiness beyond any effects of persistence. The study involved examining indicators of school readiness collected at…