Deciding which instructional strategies to employ is a complex issue faced daily by middle school teachers. Although a wealth of literature on developmentally appropriate and responsive middle school instructional practices is available, the extent to which these strategies are employed is often unknown. Thus, the purpose of this study was to…

From penmanship, to product, to process...this article recounts 100 years of instructional practice in the US elementary writing classroom through the voices of past teaching manuals and curriculum guides. This particular tale begins at the turn of the 20th century--a time when the elementary school was firmly established in the country, and…

We present a new approach for the organization of schools, which we call the flexible scheduling paradigm (FSP). FSP improves student learning by dynamically redeploying teachers and other pedagogical resources to provide students with customized learning conditions over shorter time periods called "mini-terms" instead of semesters or years. By…

The need for interdisciplinary graduate training programs which prepare students to conceptualize the application of their research in clinical settings continues to grow. Though several programs have been cultivated to address this need, demand still outweighs supply. The following describes a curriculum developed with the intent of incorporating…

College recruitment and retention strategies can be as creative as the students that teachers invite to their institutions. Universally, they understand that the first semester of college presents a number of life-changing events for the traditional-age student. As faculty advisors, they assist their students in course selection and support them…

This report provides the Nebraska Legislature with comparative statistics to monitor and evaluate progress toward achieving "three key priorities" for Nebraska's postsecondary education system: (1) Increase the number of students who enter postsecondary education in Nebraska; (2) Increase the percentage of students who enroll and…

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation's sponsorship annual report highlights our work with eleven schools that served 4,150 students in five Ohio cities during the 2016-17 school year. We value this opportunity to keep stakeholders and the public informed about our efforts, and provide information on each of the schools that we sponsor. Additionally,…

Education reform policies harvested from neoliberalism, social Darwinism, consumerism, and free-market ideologies have begun to replace the pragmatic progressivism of the pre-World War II era. In this article, I use three federal and state education reform policies and programs--No Child Left Behind Act, Common Core State Standards Initiative, and…

In 2011 members of the School of Philosophy and Theology at The University of Notre Dame Australia (UNDA) Sydney campus, designed two standards rubrics as part of a project aimed at undertaking research within the area of assuring graduate attributes and capabilities in Australian universities. The standards rubrics designed were oriented towards…

Schools of education have seen many changes over the last 100 years (Labaree 2004). More recent modifications have included the slow and steady elimination of the social foundations of education in lieu of a more direct attention to teacher skills and basic training. The increased focus on the so-called "nuts and bolts" of teacher…

The "2019 Nebraska Higher Education Progress Report" is the fourteenth annual report designed to provide the Nebraska Legislature with comparative statistics to monitor and evaluate progress toward achieving three major goals for Nebraska's postsecondary education system: (1) Increase the number of students who enter postsecondary…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the impact of flexible scheduling in school libraries on incorporating information literacy skills into the core curriculum. Participants included school librarians from middle schools in neighboring suburban and urban counties. In addition to an open-ended questionnaire, interviews and focus…

The success of discipline-based teaching requires an interplay between substantive and procedural knowledge. In Finland, disciplinary thinking was included in the National Core Curriculum and in the final assessment criteria a decade ago, which meant a change in history teaching. The outcome of this change is examined in the article with the help…

The Common Core State Standards aren't exactly new; it's been two years since most states adopted them. But it took those two years for the standards to trickle down from abstraction to daily practice, from a sheaf of papers in a state capital into a lesson plan on a teacher's desk. Now they're reshaping reading instruction in significant ways.…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 placed high demands on public schools by requiring that all students become proficient in math and reading by the year 2014. Many public schools responded to the demand by limiting curriculum to the core curriculum, particularly in the lengthening of the amount of time spent studying the subjects reading and…