This article reports upon a 3-year action research programme intended to provide trainee teachers with peer support in planning and carrying out class teaching. It was hoped that this would provide an additional encouragement for trainee-teachers to broaden their teaching repertoire, together with better opportunities to reflect on and evaluate…

Responses to the School Factors Questionnaire (SFQ) administered to 222 students were used to ascertain student perceptions of alienating factors within secondary school environments. Descriptive statistics (i.e., frequency of responses to SFQ items) were used to report the data. The results indicated that although secondary students liked coming…

An introductory CS1 course presents problems for educators and students due to students' diverse background in programming knowledge and exposure. Students who enroll in CS1 also have different expectations and motivations. Prompted by the curricular guidelines for undergraduate programmes in computer science released in 2001 by the ACM/IEEE, and…

Student admission into heritage language programs is usually determined by locally designed placement exams. However, there are no norms to guide language teaching professionals in the assessment of this student population. This study looks at placement exams completed by heritage learners of Spanish at the University of Houston. The…

Background: Although a large number of children in foster care in the United States are receiving special education services, little is known about their educational experiences. Method: This exploratory study used focus group research to look more closely at the complexity of the problems and needs that this population experiences with the…

Further education has become pivotal to English educational policy with the sector being central to strategies that seek to raise educational standards and widen participation. This article derives from a study of trainee further education (FE) teachers on a full-time, postgraduate certificate course in the Midlands. It seeks to examine trainee…

This paper reports on a cross-disciplinary study by an L1 compositionist and an applied linguist investigating interrelationships among university basic writing students' responses to linguistic identity labels, their residency statuses, and their preferences for mainstream or multilingual composition. Previous L2 writing research has suggested…

Existing research indicates that there is a disproportionate number of students with cultural and linguistic differences, English Language Learners (ELL), who are misidentified as learning disabled when their problems are due to cultural and/or linguistic differences. As a consequence, these students do not receive appropriate services. With the…

Recent court cases which have rendered decisions as to what constitutes the least restrictive environment (LRE) for students with disabilities are discussed. Six cases, decided between 1989 and 1994, are considered, half of which were decided in favor of the parents in their quest for a less restrictive setting for their child, while the other…

This developmental project was designed to solve the conflict between the Center for Teacher Education at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and the local public school districts regarding the placement of education students in public school classrooms for field work activities. The conflict arose when one major school…

This paper presents outcomes of a practicum that was designed to address a need that was created when the Ministry of Education in Ontario, Canada, mandated that all grade 9 classes be "destreamed." A review of educational literature found no methods for ensuring that classes are truly heterogeneously mixed. The practicum was designed to…

Perspectives on educating persons with disabilities and the move toward inclusive education and school restructuring are considered. Trends in the number of students with disabilities and placement patterns are briefly examined. Four categories of students that represent 95 percent of students served are identified: specific learning disabilities,…

This theme issue reports on a national survey to identify inclusive education programs for students with disabilities. First, chief state school officers were surveyed to identify local school districts where inclusion activities were taking place, including information about policy, funding, and evaluation. Next, districts identified were…

Grouping students by ability into courses with distinct curricula, or "tracking" as it is called in middle and high schools, has provoked a furious debate among educational scholars and practitioners. Research on tracking invariably characterizes the practice as a school-level, unitary phenomenon; schools are depicted as either tracked…

A research project was undertaken to determine: (1) the relationships between scores on the Florida College-Level Academic Skills Test (CLAST) and prior scores on corresponding entry placement tests; (2) the relationships between course completion patterns and performance on CLAST subtests; and (3) the relationships between grades in reading,…