Well-designed school health education should provide students with the knowledge and skills to prevent the health risk behaviors most responsible for the major causes of morbidity and mortality. This paper reports the methodology and findings of a West Virginia statewide health education assessment initiative and describes how the findings are…

A challenge for urban systemic reform initiatives in science education has been to achieve local, state, and national standards for teaching and learning. We have collaborated with teachers in the Detroit Public School System to design project-based curriculum materials that contextualize the learning of science in meaningful real-world problems,…

Ecological studies that examine how organisms interact with their environment provide a particularly useful backdrop for high school students to both quantitatively and qualitatively explore the natural world. In Hot Springs, South Dakota, the authors developed a module that integrated modern ecological theory within an American Indian cultural…

This paper discusses how the management of educational change can be affected by the fundamental beliefs about the formation and communication of knowledge that stakeholders bring to the process of implementing change. A curriculum change designed to embed vocational education into the senior years of secondary schooling was investigated from the…

What are the attributes of a high-quality early childhood education program worldwide? A group of experienced early childhood educators that represent diverse international backgrounds attempts to respond to this question by examining six dimensions of quality set forth by the Association for Childhood Education International: (1) philosophies and…

In this article, the author addresses a problem encountered in her own professional life as a teacher of writing in the context of computing, a teaching field often referred to as "computers and writing," "electronic writing," or "computer-assisted writing instruction." The problem she has observed has to do with teaching technology in a…

Over the past 6 years, Arizona State University West (ASU West), located in Phoenix, Arizona, has developed an Early Childhood program that features curricula based on the National Education Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS-T; International Society for Technology in Education [ISTE], 2000), National Technology Standards for Students…

The European dimension in education has been a term increasingly used by the European Union and the Council of Europe to denote some of their educational policies and initiatives. It has also been a contested term in academic writing, as some researchers critique the elitist, exclusionary and Eurocentric educational implications it may have, while…

The Teacher-Centered Systemic Reform model (TCSR) recognizes teaching context, teacher characteristics, teacher thinking, and their interactions as influential factors in attempts to implement classroom reform. Using the TCSR model, teachers' personal practical theories, and conceptual change as a framework, the authors of this article studied…

Computers and other communication technologies have irrevocably changed the nature of work, the workforce, and interpersonal relationships. This article suggests that these changes have resulted in a blurring of the distinction between life roles and an increase in feelings of meaningless and isolation. The authors argue that the dissolution of…

This study contributes to the field by identifying a broad range of traditional and newer middle grade policies and practices, and determining in California which of these differentiate higher- from lower-performing schools serving similar student populations, with performance measured by the state's standards-based tests. Based on a sample of 303…

In the 2008-09 school year researchers from EdSource and Stanford University conducted a large-scale study of 303 middle grades schools in California. The team surveyed 303 principals, 3,752 English Language Arts (ELA) and math teachers in grades 6-8, and 157 superintendents of the districts and charter management organizations that oversee the…

This brochure provides an overview of the American Diploma Project (ADP) Network and describes the urgent need for improvements to the U.S. educational pipeline to ensure that all students are adequately prepared for the demands of the twenty-first century workplace. Through the ADP Network, states will: (1) make their high school standards,…

The 2002 restructuring of the national curriculum in all Japanese public elementary and secondary schools includes a reduction and reallocation of instructional hours, and the addition of a new "integrated studies" course, with an emphasis on more individualized, cross-curricular thematic projects. This reform comes at a time when a…

This article describes a professional development model in which middle-grades teachers focused on algebraic thinking as part of their participation in a mathematics academy.