In this paper, the verbal interaction strategies and explanation behaviors of three fifth-grade teachers teaching science units are used to illustrate relationships among curriculum materials, teacher talk, and student learning. Experimental studies with these and other teachers indicate that, if teachers become more sensitive to their students'…

Recent court definitions of immoral conduct require that employers establish a nexus between the objectionable conduct and the individual's fitness to teach, while teacher plaintiffs have argued that dismissals for alleged immoral conduct violated various constitutional rights. This paper reviews a cross-section of recent court cases involving…

The Classroom Management Improvement Study (CMIS) was designed to investigate a complex staff development effort in order to provide a clear explication of the treatment in the event that either researchers or practitioners desired to replicate the intervention. The treatment was directed toward introducing effective classroom management…

The aim of this research was to determine whether individual differences in the use of memory and problem-solving strategies by elementary school children are related to teachers' use of strategy suggestions in the classroom. High, average, and low achievers of first- through third-grade levels (n = 38) were selected from classrooms of eight…

A study was conducted to determine the effects of student locus of control on perceptions of and resistance to teacher influence attempts. Subjects, 302 college students, were provided with 22 sets of Behavior Alteration Messages and were instructed to rate on a 1-5 scale "how frequently your teacher uses statements of each type to get you to…

At the conclusion of each student teaching semester, 50 student teachers enrolled at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale were asked to list positive and negative influences of their cooperating teachers. The study was conducted over a period of three years with three different sets of student teachers. Listings of the participants fell into…

Ways to eliminate sexism (discrimination based on sex) in Oregon State University classrooms are suggested, with attention to language, behavior, and expectations. Social outcomes of sexism are also identified. Unequal treatment singles out or ignores the individual. As a result, students may lose confidence, lower academic goals, or limit their…

Silent students are often actively involved in classroom learning despite appearances to the contrary, and teachers can use special instructional strategies to guide them to overt participation. Students with "communication apprehension" are often assumed to have low intelligence, but they may suffer instead from shyness, various…

Profiles are presented of six superior educators whose students achieved an excellence far beyond what might be expected of them. The subjects were a speech and drama teacher, a girls' basketball coach, a choral music teacher, an art teacher, and principals of an elementary and a secondary school. The major finding of the study was that, without…

The National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS) is the third in a series of longitudinal studies sponsored by the Center for Education Statistics of the Department of Education. The NELS focuses on 26,000 randomly selected eighth-grade students constituting a national sample. The study involved administration of a cognitive test to…

Extreme classroom discipline can cause post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) in children. Only extraordinary stressors qualify as stressors resulting in PTSD, yet this requirement is inadequate. Although corporal punishment may be common and acceptable in certain areas, acutely corporally punished children exhibit PTSD, regardless of the region.…

Interactions between teachers and multiply disabled students were videotaped, and procedures were developed to analyze the interactions, in order to assist the teachers in evaluating the relationship between their own and their student's communicative behavior. Coding categories were prepared to identify characteristics of the student's…

One hundred interactions involving 4,231 communicative acts between classroom personnel and multiply disabled students were videotaped. The resulting data were coded and analyzed, and showed that: (1) conventional communicative forms (e.g., speech, manual signs, conventional nonverbal expressions) were selected to convey information to students…

This study investigated the instructional beliefs of 182 elementary classroom teachers to determine the degree to which teachers' assumptions about instructional practices influence their teaching behavior and the classroom perceptions of their students. It used data collected from a national research project, Goodlad's "A Study of…

Focusing on the improvement of discipline skills and management strategies for classroom teachers, four major intervention and management techniques used in classroom discipline are reviewed: (1) Teacher Effectiveness Training, a course focusing on teacher-student relationships within the framework of effective human relations and recognition of…