Six of the first vocational education (VE) programs to adopt new voluntary national skill standards were studied to identify the opportunities and challenges faced by VE programs adopting the new standards. The VE programs studied were located in high schools in seven cities: Chalmette and Walker, Louisiana; Chicago, Illinois; L'Anse Creuse,…

Vocational education and training (VET) research in Australia has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. In a 1993 report titled "No Small Change," VET research was characterized as a fragmented activity that was underfunded and had little or no relevance to policy or practice in the VET sector. Since that time, increased funding through the…

Examines the reasons given by professional and paraprofessional librarians for participating in continuing education programs offered by the North Carolina Library Staff Development Program. Use of the Participation Reasons Scale is discussed, and four underlying components for participation are described: (1) personal concerns, (2) patron…

Describes collaboration between the University of California at Berkeley and four other universities to develop interoperable servers containing each participant's Computer Science Technical Reports and to make them available over the Internet using standard protocols. The proposed library architecture, approaches to indexing and retrieval, and…

Improving the services for children with emotional or behavioral problems has been one of the priorities of the Department of Education for the last four decades. Since its implementation, the Office of Special Education Programs has been dedicated to funding and supporting research in the area of emotional disorders. Despite increased attention…

Confusion and furies about issues such as gender and sexuality present themselves as counternarratives about schooling. Rather than treat them as situations for educational administrators to manage or evade, the author proposes to use these counternarratives to fundamentally reframe educational leadership to be a profession proud of and skilled at…

This chapter describes the nature of bilingual education for Hispanics of Mexican origin (Chicanos), outlines successful and unsuccessful classroom approaches to bilingual education, and proposes a research agenda for the future. Four principal approaches have been used in observational studies of language use in bilingual classrooms, including…

A recent National Research Council study, "Improving Schooling for Language-Minority Children: A Research Agenda" examined the status of bilingual education research and the direction of future studies. The report is discussed here, in a format corresponding to the report's sections on domains of research and practice: bilingualism and…

Changes in our world have made it more difficult for children to find protected, exciting places to play and interesting, satisfactory things to play with. This edited volume, resulting from the collaboration of Bank Street College (New York, New York), Erikson Institute (Chicago, Illinois), Pacific Oaks College (Pasadena, California), and…

The research agenda for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) teaching and learning summarizes issues identified for further study by ESL professionals over the period of 1996-1998. The document is designed to provide funding agencies with clear priorities for research suggested by leaders in the field, provide researchers with support for proposing…

This paper identifies curriculum and instructional issues in secondary school programs for students with mild disabilities, describes some promising lines of ongoing research, and recommends long and short term research, development, and demonstration activities for support by the federal Office of Special Education Programs. The first section…

The literature review presented in this paper examined the available research in the area of the rapid burnout of beginning teachers (50 percent of America's beginning public school teachers leave the classroom within their first 7 years of experience and never return to the profession; more than two-thirds of that percentage do so within the…

A selection of papers on second language learning includes: "Second Language Acquisition Research in the Language Classroom" (David Nunan); "A Place for Second Language Acquisition in Teacher Development and in Teacher Education Programmes" (Rod Bolitho); "Dimensions in the Acquisition of Oral Language" (Martin Bygate, Don Porter); "The Learner's…

This seven-chapter monograph elaborates on five components of an expanded vision of basic education. It presents material that deals with aspects of these components: universalizing access and promoting equity, focusing on learning, broadening the means and scope of basic education, enhancing the environment for learning, and strengthening…

These proceedings contain presentations and materials from a conference to discuss the need for a system of lifelong learning for youth and adults with disabilities. Section I, "Welcome and Conference Challenge," presents brief opening remarks by Betsy Brand and Robert Davila. Section II contains an executive summary and the keynote…