States that discovering the origins of one's school music group can promote interest in the school's music programs. Discusses books that provide historical information on school music programs; provides ideas for formulating teaching objectives; and tells how to locate sources and organize data. (DB)

Arguing that creativity in doctoral research has been underemphasized, this article offers five principles drawn from theoretical and research literature for advisors cultivating creative dissertation work and examines each principle from three contextual perspectives: individual psychology, theoretical-methodological, and institutional. (PB)

Describes an approach to devising realistic laboratory projects to enhance research training for undergraduates. Students replicate all or part of an experiment from a core article that provides the framework for the research project in terms of scope, method, and reporting. Advantages and limitations of the method are discussed. (GEA)

Students talented in science were offered an opportunity to use community research facilities and to conduct scientific research in an independent study course at Avon Grove High School in Kemblesville, Pennsylvania. The course involved peer collaboration, cooperative learning, the teacher as mentor, research papers, and oral presentations. (JDD)

Describes Kids Network, an educational network available from the National Geographic Society that allows students in grades four through six to become part of research teams that include students from around the world. Computer hardware requirements and a list of Kids Network research questions are listed in a sidebar. (JMV)

Describes how a high school English teacher helped her students learn about background knowledge, organization, metacognition, discussion, and writing by experimentally investigating their own learning. Notes that this approach helped students feel more ownership in their work and in their own knowledge about learning. (SR)

Addresses the hypothesis that a shift toward more widely-available, less comprehensive workstation indexes is changing the nature of academic library research (based on statistical data from the chemistry library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Topics include an explanation of Zipf's "Principle of Least Effort" and…

Describes how reference collections can be used by middle school students to evaluate poems as literature and sources of historical fact. Two sidebars list U.S. history reference books appropriate for middle schools and story poems that can be used for an authentification project. (JMV)

Analysis of responses of 55 graduates of a doctoral program in special education between 1975 and 1988 indicated that more postgraduation publication was reported by respondents who had published or presented a paper as students; were employed in academic or research positions; and had research apprenticeships. (DB)

Presented are 15 ideas for projects which require gifted elementary or middle school students to study a topic in depth. Ideas are in an easy-to-use "reproduce, cut, and distribute" format. Ideas are intended to foster individual creativity and production and cover such topics as plantations, insects, stars, telephones, bridges, and space. (DB)

As a means of improving their writing skills, mostly African-American students from Elizabeth City State University gathered reports from African Americans in 16 northeastern North Carolina counties about extrasensory perception, contact with the dead, and other anomalous experiences and compared them to reports from Chinese students and students…

Students at Hunter College Elementary School chose 10 events in the 20th century, 1 per decade, and completed research, art, and writing projects that would represent their viewpoint on each of the events. Students made collages containing photographs and headlines relating to their selected events and wrote autobiographical statements connecting…

Describes a long-term science study project on natural disasters and phenomena in a second-grade classroom in which students had the major responsibility to plan, choose, inquire, and problem solve as they chose topics, browsed and read, planned and made murals, wrote and drew in their journals, and designed dramas which mixed story and…

Although Fort Pitt Elementary School used to be the lowest achieving school in the Pittsburgh area, reading scores and discipline are dramatically improving, thanks to the Independent Research Project for fourth- and fifth-grade students. (MLH)

Explores the possibility of collaborative research undertaken by professors in conjunction with their undergraduate students. Provides various institutional strategies by which student-faculty collaborative research might be encouraged. (HB)