Background: Recent government papers have expressed concern about the poor educational attainment of "looked after" children. Early reading development has been found to be significant in their subsequent academic achievement. The possibility that biosocial factors extraneous to their experiences in public care may underpin their low…

Classroom assessment of writing is considered from an anthropological perspective as practitioners' tool use. Pan Canadian data from a 2002 English teacher questionnaire (N = 4070) about self-reported assessment practices were analyzed in terms of tool choice and use by secondary teachers of different experience and qualification levels. Four…

Students entering Steve Speier's Spanish class pull their personal laptops from their packs and begin preparing for the lesson. Some review Speier's board notes containing a combination of typed phrases and dozens of handdrawn vocabulary words saved as PDF files from his interactive white board Notebook program. Others don headphones and listen to…

A structural model of school learning was tested to examine both direct and indirect influences of previous grades, quality of instruction, motivation, quantity of instruction, and homework on Hispanic-American eighth-grade students' academic achievement, while controlling for background variables. The model was analyzed with path analytic…

This practicum was developed to involve Hispanic parents in a middle school where Hispanic parent involvement was nonexistent. Thirty at-risk Hispanic eighth graders in an urban middle school were identified by the eighth-grade guidance counselor as in danger of not being promoted to the ninth grade. The objectives of this practicum were that 30%…

This publication reports the results of the second International Assessment of Educational Progress for science. Twenty countries assessed the mathematics and science achievement of 13-year-old students and 14 countries assessed 9-year-old students in these same subjects. In some cases, participants assessed virtually all age-eligible children in…

A program implemented in a rural elementary school in Florida had the goal of increasing parental involvement of students in grades 1, 4, and 5. The majority of students in the school were black, came from single-parent homes, and were considered low-income. Prior to program implementation, a parent survey revealed that of 53 parents, 21 read to…

Developed by the Oklahoma State Department of Health, this booklet is the second in a series that provides tips that parents can use to help their children grow. The booklet is divided into three sections. The first section, "Getting Along as a Person," discusses a child's self-esteem, self-concept, and self-control, and suggests ways for parents…

This paper presents a literature review on self-regulated learning and then reports two investigations. The two investigations identified situations that seemed likely to afford opportunities for self-regulated learning to occur and followed what parents and teachers did to provide implicit support in these situations. The hypothesis was that the…

Causal modeling procedures were used to test causal inferences about hypothesized relationships among the major influences on science learning outcomes for a secondary-two (equivalent to grade 8) sample of Singaporean students. A sample of approximately 900 was selected from schools that represented the population of secondary-two students.…

This guide presents questions that parents frequently ask about their children's school, along with answers to those questions. The questions and answers were prepared based on the results of studies conducted by the Partnership for Family Involvement in Education, the U.S. Department of Education, the GTE Foundation, and by the National Center…

This booklet for teachers and administrators presents suggestions for addressing the needs of homeless children as they enter school, and for helping the children feel safe, comfortable, part of the group, able to contribute and participate, and important and valued. Tips and recommendations are presented under the following headings: (1) school…

This book provides practical, commonsense strategies successfully used by teachers to help students become active, responsible learners. In general, these strategies are centered on mutual respect, not bossiness; collaboration, not isolation; commitment to learning, not fear of failure; and the dignity of all, not praise or rewards for a few. Each…

Materials related to Hudson's Bay High School's (Vancouver, Washington) program to improve school effectiveness are presented. On the first page are enumerated six steps that were taken to implement the program, including the administration of an Effective Schools Evaluation Instrument asking faculty to identify needed improvements. Eight teams…

Selecting elite students out of a huge collective is a difficult task. The main problem is to provide automated processes to reduce human work. ECMS (Educational Contest Management System) is an online tool approach to help--fully or partly automated--with the task of selecting such elite students out of a mass of candidates. International tests…