American Educational Research Journal

The effect of retention in first grade (Year 1) on parents' educational expectations was tested in a sample of 530 ethnically diverse and academically at-risk children. Participants attended one of three school districts in Texas. Of the 530 children, 118 were retained in first grade. Retention had a negative effect on parent expectations in Year 2, which was maintained in Year 3. Year 2 parent expectations partially mediated the effect of retention in first grade on Year 3 reading and math achievement and child academic self-efficacy. All effects controlled for Year 1 measures of the outcome. Results were similar across gender, economic adversity, and ethnicity. Implications for minimizing the negative effect of retention on parents' expectations are suggested.

This article investigates the empirical basis for often-repeated arguments that gender differences in entrance into STEM majors are largely explained by disparities in prior achievement. Analyses use data from three national cohorts of college matriculates across three decades to consider differences across several indicators of high school math and science achievement at the mean and also at the top of the test distribution. Analyses also examine the different comparative advantages men and women enjoy in math/science vs. English/reading. Regardless of how prior achievement is measured, very little of the strong and persistent gender gap in physical science and engineering majors over time is explained. Findings highlight the limitations of theories focusing on gender differences in skills and suggest directions for future research.

The transition to adult roles usually occurs within a normative age span. By focusing on preadolescence to late adolescence using 2-wave panel data, this research seeks to develop a more informed picture of how "early" exit from the student role and "early" entry into the adult role of parent or spouse reflect factors operating prior to adolescence. The short term consequences of adult role transition on teenage status aspirations, life plans, other psychological orientations, and parental influence are also examined. Even though multiple role transition is frequently observed, only leaving school early appears to be related to preadolescent career decisions and academic performance in high school. The determinants of early transition to the role of parent or spouse do not appear to be socioeconomic origins, parental child rearing techniques or other specific influences, academic ability or performance, or preadolescent aspirations, as has generally been hypothesized in the literature. Research dilemmas and policy implications are discussed.

The confluence theory, which hypothesizes a relationship between intellectual development birth order, and family size, was examined in a colombian study of more than 36,000 college applicants. The results of the study did not support the confluence theory. The confluence theory states that the intellectual development of a child is related to average mental age of the members of his family at the time of his birth. The mental age of the parents is always assigned a value of 30 and siblings are given scores equivalent to their chronological age at the birth of the subject. Therefore, the average mental age of family members for a 1st born child is 30, or 60 divided by 2. If a subject is born into a family consisting of 2 parents and a 6-year old sibling, the average mental age of family members tends, therefore, to decrease with each birth order. The hypothesis derived from the confluence theory states that there is a positive relationship between average mental age of a subject's family and the subject's performance on intelligence tests. In the Colombian study, data on family size, birth order and socioeconomic status was derived from college application forms. Intelligence test scores for each subject was obtained from college entrance exams. The mental age of each applicant's family at the time of the applicant's birth was calculated. Multiple correlation analysis and path analysis were used to assess the relationship. Results were 1) the test scores of subjects from families with 2,3,4, and 5 children were higher than test scores of the 1st born subjects; 2) the rank order of intelligence by family size was 3,4,5,2,6,1 instead of the hypothesized 1,2,3,4,5,6; and 3) only 1% of the variability in test scores was explained by the variables of birth order and family size. Further analysis indicated that socioeconomic status was a far more powerful explanatory variable than family size.

Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study, this study revisited rural-nonrural disparities in educational attainment by considering a comprehensive set of factors that constrain and support youth's college enrollment and degree completion. Results showed that rural students were more advantaged in community social resources compared to nonrural students, and these resources were associated with a significant increase in the likelihood of bachelor's degree attainment. Yet results confirmed that rural students lagged behind nonrural students in attaining a bachelor's degree largely due to their lower socioeconomic background. The findings present a more comprehensive picture of the complexity of geographic residence in shaping college enrollment and degree attainment.

Student turnover has many negative consequences for students and schools, and the high mobility rates of disadvantaged students may exacerbate inequality. Scholars have advised schools to reduce mobility by building and improving relationships with and among families, but such efforts are rarely tested rigorously. A cluster-randomized field experiment in 52 predominantly Hispanic elementary schools in San Antonio, TX, and Phoenix, AZ, tested whether student mobility in early elementary school was reduced through Families and Schools Together (FAST), an intervention that builds social capital among families, children, and schools. FAST failed to reduce mobility overall but substantially reduced the mobility of Black students, who were especially likely to change schools. Improved relationships among families help explain this finding.

Working from a core perspective on the developmental implications of economic disadvantage, this study attempted to identify family-based mechanisms of economic effects on early learning and their potential school-based remedies. Multilevel analysis of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort revealed that the accumulation of markers of economic disadvantage reduced math and reading testing gains across the primary grades. Such disparities were partially mediated by corresponding differences in children's socioemotional problems, parenting stress, and parents' human capital investments. These patterns appeared to be robust to observed and unobserved confounds. Various teacher qualifications and classroom practices were assessed as moderators of these family mediators, revealing teacher experience in grade level as a fairly consistent buffer against family-based risks for reading.

This study examined visual information processing and learning in classrooms including both deaf and hearing students. Of particular interest were the effects on deaf students' learning of live (three-dimensional) versus video-recorded (two-dimensional) sign language interpreting and the visual attention strategies of more and less experienced deaf signers exposed to simultaneous, multiple sources of visual information. Results from three experiments consistently indicated no differences in learning between three-dimensional and two-dimensional presentations among hearing or deaf students. Analyses of students' allocation of visual attention and the influence of various demographic and experimental variables suggested considerable flexibility in deaf students' receptive communication skills. Nevertheless, the findings also revealed a robust advantage in learning in favor of hearing students.

A randomized experiment of Comer's School Development Program was conducted in 23 middle schools in Prince George's County, Maryland. It showed that Comer schools implemented some of the program's central elements better than control schools, but not all or even most of them. This shortfall in program implementation was probably responsible for students in the experimental schools not changing any more than controls. After all, quasi-experimental analyses showed that the program theory may well be correct in many of its predictions about student changes in psychological and social outcomes, but not achievement. However, achievement gains were found in schools with a more explicit academic focus, suggesting that improving this focus should be as central to Comer's program theory as improving the school's social climate. Even more needed, though, are ways to improve program implementability, the sine qua non for student change.

Text: book, with Instructor's Manual; for undergraduates in psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

The purpose of this study was to explore the personal stories of women who selected and continue to excel at careers in areas of mathematics, science, and technology to better understand the ways in which their self-efficacy beliefs influenced their academic and career choices. Analysis of 15 narratives revealed that vicarious experiences and verbal persuasions were critical sources of the women's self-efficacy beliefs. These findings suggest that the perceived importance of these sources of self-efficacy beliefs may be stronger for women in male-oriented domains than for the majority of individuals operating in traditional settings. As expected, self-efficacy perceptions resulted in the perseverance and resiliency required to overcome academic and career obstacles. Findings support and refine the theoretical tenets of A. Bandura's (1986) social cognitive theory, and they also suggest that critical tenets in this theory are consistent with the work of C. Gilligan (1982). 2 AGAINST TH...

Presents data from experiments and observational studies on the nature of imaginative play and its relationship to the developmental theories of Piaget, E. H. Erikson, and H. Werner. The adaptive and psychopathological implications of make-believe games and fantasy are considered. Implications for child care, education, and psychotherapy are noted. (111/2 p. ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

It is only in recent years that educational evaluation has become institutionalized. The present spate of reporting and the accepted belief in the necessity to evaluate can be traced to the 1965 passage of the massive Elementary and Secondary Education Act--the first major social legislation to mandate project reporting. This case study in policy research examines the congruence between the assumptions and expectations that generated these notions of evaluation and reform and the dominant constraints and incentives in the Title I policy system. The central question of this study concerns the degree to which the expectations of reformers about the conduct and use of evaluation squared with the behavior of individuals and bureaucracies, particularly in a federal system. Senator Robert Kennedy, the principal architect of the 1965 Title I evaluation requirement, viewed mandated evaluation as a means of political accountability. Reformers of a different stripe hoped that Title I evaluation could revitalize federal management of education programs. But state and local schoolmen argued that an evaluation requirement would presage federal control of local education. This tension between proponents and opponents of evaluation characterized Title I evaluation history. (Author/JM)

Three 40 minute science lessons, which had been carefully planned to minimize extraneous teacher behavior, were taken by the writer with Form II (Grade 7) classes. During the lessons pupil responding and teacher reacting variables were experimentally manipulated. A posttest of achievement was administered following the lessons and predicted posttest scores were calculated from the regression of a number of pretest measures (e.g., verbal ability, prior knowledge, attitudes) on this posttest. Residual achievement scores, calculated by subtracting predicted from obtained posttest scores, were used in analyses of variance to determine treatment effects. Results indicated that pupil participation, in the form of overt pupil responses to teacher questions, was a weak variable having little effect on pupil achievement. However, regular positive teacher reactions to pupil responses facilitated pupil achievement significantly more than minimal teacher reactions.

This study addresses three themes that recur in the research on student achievement: (a) developmental modeling of intraindividual changes in achievement over time; (b) examination of the differences among subgroups within a classroom in the determinants of achievement; (c) description of the interactions among instructional variables in determining achievement differences. Eight classrooms were pre selected on the basis of their widely differing slopes obtained in a regression analysis of pre- and posttest achievement scores. Mathematics achievement differences among sixth graders were analyzed in a four-wave design and explained by aptitude and instructional variables in a structural equation framework provided by LISREL. The results demonstrate the local nature of achievement models in that neither their measurement nor structural components proved generalizable across both groups of classrooms. Mention is also made, however, of technical problems and analytical ambiguities in the interpretation of these results.

This study is concerned with the general question of the extent to which children between the age of 5 and 10 have achieved mastery of their native language, and explores areas of disparity between adult and child grammar. Mrs. Chomsky has examined a sample of 40 children and presents the actual interview material as well as a report on her experiments, theoretical considerations of linguistic complexity, and a summary. This pioneering attempt to unravel the complex network of the later stages of syntax acquisition will undoubtedly be of great relevance to linguists and psychologists.

In both the United States and Europe, concerns have been raised about whether preservice and in-service training succeeds in equipping teachers with the professional knowledge they need to deliver consistently high-quality instruction. This article investigates the significance of teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge for high-quality instruction and student progress in secondary-level mathematics. It reports findings from a 1-year study conducted in Germany with a representative sample of Grade 10 classes and their mathematics teachers. Teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge was theoretically and empirically distinguishable from their content knowledge. Multilevel structural equation models revealed a substantial positive effect of pedagogical content knowledge on students’ learning gains that was mediated by the provision of cognitive activation and individual learning support.

This paper describes conditions and circumstances in students' family, peer, and school worlds which students perceive as creating pressures and stress powerful enough to divert their attention and interest from school. Rather than assuming that minority status, linguistic differences, part-time employment, peers and/or poverty necessarily create problems for young adults, students were asked about why they thought they were not connecting in educational settings. The focus, then, is on all students and not just those identified as at-risk. Results indicate significant variation in the types and frequencies of problems for different types of youth. Students whose worlds are congruent and who transition smoothly report tremendous stress from teachers and parents to achieve academically. Other students who report difficulties in making transitions between different worlds worry about understanding course materials as they struggle to make passing grades. Still other students, for whom transitions are most difficult, are burdened with uncertain futures. All students stressed the importance of being connected to at least one caring and empathetic adult in their school environment. When that happened, students were more likely to seek help. (RJM)

Aptitude-treatment interactions (ATI) are relatively unexamined in research on teacher effectiveness but may be important in describing the teaching-learning process. In an experiment on teacher effectiveness, 399 sixth-grade students were taught ecology for nine lessons. Trained teachers used one of eight factorially defined teaching treatments which varied teacher behaviors of structuring, soliciting, and reacting. Generalized regression analyses on dependent variables of multiple choice, attitude, and perception of teaching showed aptitudes to be major predictors relative to teacher, treatment, and ATI effects. ATI effects were more frequent and stronger predictors than treatment effects in almost all cases, though ATI terms usually absorbed only one to two percent of variation in the criterion variables. The methodology and findings of this study suggest changes for research on teacher effectiveness.

In order to investigate elementary school students' understanding of historical time, this study conducted open-ended interviews with 58 children in kindergarten through sixth grade. The students were asked to place nine illustrations from various periods of American history in chronological order and to talk about the reasoning behind the order they chose. The paintings and photographs consisted of scenes broadly representative of a particular era, such as the colonial period, the 1920s, or the 1960s. The study found that even the youngest children made some basic distinctions in historical time and that those distinctions became increasingly differentiated with age. Dates, however, had little meaning for children before third grade; and although third- and fourth-graders understood the numerical basis of dates, only by fifth grade did students extensively connect particular dates with specific background knowledge. At all ages, children's placement of most pictures revealed substantial agreement with each other and with the correct order. Two appendixes contain copies of the illustrations used in the study and the interview protocol. (MDM)

Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, School of Education, 1967. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 133-138).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Buffalo, 1983. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-83). Photocopy of typescript.

A study reports on the first 3 years of a 5-year study focusing on characteristics of educational practice that accompany student achievement in English language arts in middle and high schools. The study attempts to specify features of instruction that make a difference in student learning by comparing high-achieving and under-achieving schools which are otherwise similar. It involved 19 middle and high school English programs in Florida, New York, and California schools exhibiting diversity in population, educational problems, and approaches to improvement, and it was organized as a nested case design with the program as a case and the class including teachers and students, as cases within. Findings suggest higher achieving schools are characterized by instructional programs in which: (1) skills and knowledge are taught in multiple types of lessons; (2) tests are deconstructed to inform curriculum and instruction; (3) within curriculum and instruction, connections are made across content and structure to ensure coherence; (4) strategies for thinking and doing are emphasized; (5) generative learning is encouraged; and (6) classrooms are organized to foster collaboration and cogitation. Contains 9 tables and 36 references. Appendixes describe schools involved in the study and list related reports. (EF)

This research explored the hypothesis that the rich and varied experience of black youth with figurative language outside school would enhance their understanding of figurative language in school texts. Path analysis confirmed that for black students, “sounding” skill as well as general verbal ability, has a direct influence on figurative language comprehension. Black language ability influences figurative language comprehension indirectly through its effect on sounding skill. For white students, only general verbal ability affects figurative language comprehension.

This study originated in 1968, when desegregation was being carried out mainly on a one-way basis, by busing minority pupils to predominantly white schools. Two of the districts studied, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Providence, Rhode Island, were then groping their way toward racial balance, primarily because of local pressures, and both had instituted some desegregation of black as well as white schools. The third district, the Sacramento City Unified School District, Sacramento, California, was resisting both racial balance and two-way desegregation when field work for this project began. Only early in 1972, when this research was ending, did the Sacramento district show signs of beginning to implement state racial balance requirements in its desegregation plans. The bulk of the research for this project was carried out under a contract to the Commission on Civil Rights. Most of the data were collected in the winter and spring of 1969 during field trips of approximately three weeks' duration to each of the districts. Field work included interviews with school district administrators, board members, principals, teachers, community leaders active in desegregation, parents, and students. School district records, organizational files, and newspaper accounts were examined. Local studies, reports, and position papers on desegregation were collected, and copies of court decisions, citizen complaints, public hearings, and legislation bearing on desegregation were studied. (Author/JM)

Incl. bibl., abstract. Attacks on the legitimacy of affirmative action pose new challenges for public universities committed to creating a diverse student population without considering race or ethnicity as factors in admissions. On the basis of a case study of the controversy surrounding the building of a charter school at the University of California, San Diego, in response to the elimination of affirmative action in University of California admissions, the authors describe the meaning-making process by which that campus established new procedures for promoting educational equality and constructed new meanings to justify those policies and to resolve conflicts about their legitimacy. The charter school was created after a contentious public debate, in which the concept for the school and tacit definitions of equality, of social responsibility, and of the university itself became objects of contestation. The analysis reveals (a) the constitutive social processes by which particular meanings of equality and social responsibility are constructed and institutionalized, and (b) the role of higher education policy in reconstituting meanings of equality in the wake of affirmative action's political retreat. [UMI]

How and why is national policy translated into interactions between teachers and pupils? This article examines the enactment of the English National Literacy Strategy (NLS) in a case study of two consecutive Year 6 literacy lessons, which are drawn from a year long ethnographic study of the NLS in one school. Although the teacher taught directly from and adhered closely to the prescribed materials, curricular contents were recontextualised into the interactional genres habitual in that classroom, and the open questions that constituted the primary aim of the lesson were suppressed. In explaining these patterns of enactment, I supplement analysis of teacher knowledge and policy support with consideration of conditions of teacher engagement with the curricular materials and the durability of interactional genres, rooted in pupil collusion and habitus.

This study investigates whether there are differences in the print environments and experiences offered to children in 20 first-grade classrooms chosen from very low- and very high-socioeconomic status (SES) districts. Each classroom was visited for 4 full days over the course of a school year. On each visit, information was recorded about the classroom library, classroom environmental print, and any activity during the school day that involved print in any way. Data indicate that there are substantial differences between the low- and high-SES classrooms in all major areas examined, including the amount, type, and uses of print. Literacy can be added to the list of domains for which meaningful differences in instruction have been observed in schools serving different socioeconomic groups. Literacy is another domain through which schools may contribute to lower levels of achievement among low-SES children and may begin to do so quite early in the schooling process.

In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Elementary Education. Also available on microfilm. Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Alberta, 1970.

This study investigated the extent to which an instructional-learning management system (the Self-Schedule System) is effective as an intervention technique in promoting the development of young children's self-responsibility in managing their school learning. A student interview questionnaire, the Self-Responsibility Interview Schedule, was constructed to assess children's knowledge about what they do in school, and whether they perceive that they, rather than the teacher, are responsible for managing their own learning. A total of 134 second graders enrolled in individualized instruction programs at two schools were divided into three experimental groups: (1) a class which adopted the Self-Schedule System; (2) three classes (from the same school) serving as one comparison group; and (3) classes (from a second school) serving as another comparison group. The majority of children in groups 1 and 2 came from low-income black families; children in group 3 came from suburban lower middle class white families. Measures of self-responsibility for school learning, student perception of intellectual achievement responsibility, and student task performance were used in the investigation. Results indicate that the Self-Schedule System significantly affected children's perception of self-responsibility for their school learning as well as their rate of task completion. (Author/ED)

A thesis presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Education of Harvard University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education. Thesis (Ph.D.)--Harvard University. References: leaves [122]-133. Photocopy of typescript.

This study used a multistage mixed-methods analysis to assess the content-related validity (i.e., item validity, sampling validity) and construct-related validity (i.e., substantive validity, structural validity, outcome validity, generalizability) of a teaching evaluation form (TEF) by examining students' perceptions of characteristics of effective college teachers. Participants were 912 undergraduate and graduate students (10.7% of student body) from various academic majors enrolled at a public university. A sequential mixed-methods analysis led to the development of the CARE-RESPECTED Model of Teaching Evaluation, which represented characteristics that students considered to reflect effective college teaching--comprising four meta-themes ("c"ommunicator, "a"dvocate, "r"esponsible, "e"mpowering) and nine themes ("r"esponsive, "e"nthusiast, "s"tudent centered, "p"rofessional, "e"xpert, "c"onnector, "t"ransmitter, "e"thical, and "d"irector). Three of the most prevalent themes were not represented by any of the TEF items; also, endorsement of most themes varied by student attribute (e.g., gender, age), calling into question the content- and construct-related validity of the TEF scores. (Contains 3 figures, 11 tables and 9 notes.)

Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in American educational research journal, published by and copyright Sage Publications, Inc. This article draws on data from a single element of a larger project which focused on the issue of "touching" between education and child care professionals and children in a number of settings. This case study looks at a school once internationally renowned as the exemplar of "free" schooling. The authors consider how the school works as a community, how it impacts on its students, and how it copes with the strictures of the audit culture in relation to "risk" and "safety." The authors’ experiences led them to the realization that physical "touch" was an irrelevant focus in this school, and they developed the notion of "relational touch." Summerhill works in ways that approximate an inversion of the audit culture. The authors argue that progressive and critical conceptions of education continue to have much to learn from concrete examples like Summerhill and conclude that a revival of such values in education is long overdue.

This book contains many general and specific suggestions on how schools might deal with moral education. School personnel need to be aware and knowledgeable of the dimensions of moral education--helping people to deal with questions of right and wrong in the ways they treat each other. Most of the theoretical issues presented in the book are concerned less with basic philosophical and metaphysical questions and have more concern with rationales and frameworks for curriculum content, instructional emphasis, and organizational climates for school programs. Part I of the book offers chapters which provide a philosophical framework to moral education and which discuss the aims and methods of moral education in China, Russia, England, and the United States. It also contains two chapters on moral education in the hidden curriculum and on instructional issues. Part II contains descriptions and critiques of the values clarification approach to moral education. Part III is concerned with the cognitive-developmental approach and Part IV with the cognitive approach. A postscript deals with questions of action implementation. (Author/RM)

Information that is significant in the light of die conceptual framework, or “schema,” within which a text is interpreted ought to be better learned and recalled than less significant information. This hypothesis was evaluated in an experiment in which college students read narratives about a meal at a fine restaurant or a trip to a supermarket. The same 18 items of food, attributed to the same characters, were mentioned in the same order in the two stories. As predicted, foods from categories determined to be part of most people’s restaurant schemata were better recalled by students who read the restaurant narrative. Also as predicted, students who received the restaurant narrative were more likely to recall the character to whom a food had been attributed. However, contrary to expectation, participants were equally likely to reproduce food-order information whichever passage they had read. Information of the same significance in the context of either the restaurant or supermarket story was equally well recalled by the two groups.

This article reports the results of a study that compared the strategies used by three different groups of upper secondary school students to regulate their own learning processes: Australian students, Japanese students at school in Japan, and Japanese students studying in Australian schools. Although students in the three groups used a similar range of strategies, the pattern of use for each cultural group varied. Variations in the pattern of strategy use were also associated with academic achievement. The structuring of the physical environment for study purposes and the checking of one's work were two of the most important strategies for each of the groups. The Japanese students used memory strategies significantly more than did the Australian students. Furthermore, although Japanese students studying in Australia resembled their Australian counterparts more than their Japanese counterparts on many of the strategies, they still attached significantly greater importance to the use of memorization than did the Australian students. This finding is discussed in the light of cultural and educational differences between the two groups in terms of their beliefs regarding the relationship between memorization and understanding.

Incl. bibl.

This study investigates the effects of subject and track level on the definitions of knowledge used by teachers in secondary education. Responding to 20 scales of an inventory, 202 teachers provided 313 judgements of the characteristics of their own subject as they actually taught it to students of one or more track levels. The first dimension of a principal components solution was interpreted as a contrast between everyday knowledge and academic knowledge. The second dimension involved a contrast between general and specialized knowledge. As far as individual teachers responded to more than one track level, they, generally speaking, maintained a single definition of their subject for all track levels. Subject identity explained most of the differences, but teacher variables were also relevant. If it is allowed to order teacher hierarchally, based on their teacher training and their experience with track levels, then in the group of teachers with the highest track level, only the science subjects were judged as extremely hard and specialized. In the group of teachers ranking lower, some other subjects such as the foreign languages were judged as relatively hard and specialized, whereas the science subjects weere judged as less hard and less specialized. The theoretical an practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Disturbed by inequities created by tracking, many schools have attempted to "detrack" by consciously organizing students into academically heterogeneous classrooms. This paper, based on a year-long interpretive study of a detracked ninth grade English-History "core" program at a diverse urban high school, focuses on the encounter between the core teachers' progressive teaching practices in their detracked classrooms and the "unofficial" (Dyson, 1993) social worlds of the students who were enacting those practices. Highlighting small group work as a critical point of convergence and tension between these two classroom worlds, this paper describes how the racially and socioeconomically polarized nature of the overall school context framed and permeated students' interactions in the detracked class, leading, at times, to a reiteration of the very inequalities which detracking was designed to address. It considers the challenges of teaching for social justice in racially and socioeconomically divided settings, and offers suggestions for practice. (Contains 33 references, 8 notes, and 3 tables of data.) (Author/RS)

Thesis (M.S.)--Dept. of Psychology, University of Utah, 1964. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [46]-47).

This book sets out to put the many questions raised by the selection of urban teachers into a meaningful context, and to suggest some answers. The thesis of this book is that, as quickly as possible, the process by which urban teachers are selected must be converted to a contemporary merit and fitness system. The ability to understand and reach all kinds of children, and to devise or apply new approaches to that end when necessary, must be vigorously sought. Except for the first chapter, the book is organized sequentially; Chapters two through seven cover the various aspects of teacher selection, moving from the training of urban teachers through their recruitment, selection, and assignment to their accountability and promotion. Chapter one is designed to provide an overview of the urban teacher's world: what is the teacher like; what are the students like; what is the school and school district like; what important pressures bear down on the teacher; and how does he or she respond. The book is directed at the broad range of people who are vitally interested in public education and who can affect its future course. The New York City Commission on Human Rights' investigation of teacher supervisor selection in the city school system provided the inspiration for this book. Much of the factual material, updated and expanded where necessary, came from the hearings. (Author/JM)

Examining the role played by ideology in a teacher research group, a study focused on the differing ideologies on research, teaching/learning, and writing held and developed by the members of the group. Treatments of teacher research remain directed mainly at clarifying the content, the status, and the boundaries of the research practice engaged in by teachers and describing how teacher research contrasts with "university research" with regard to these elements. The well-supported, university-affiliated teacher research group was comprised of from 19 to 20 teachers representing a wide spectrum of grade levels. All on the high school and college level taught English. Ethnographic participant observation occurred over the span of two years. Case studies of three members of the group illustrate the three global positions taken by members in the teacher research group: a "teacher empowerment" position, a "social change" position, and a "professional development" position. The concept of ideology was utilized to emphasize that beliefs about society, politics, and cognition are intimately bound up in the teacher researchers' different perspectives. Analysis of the ideological positions that developed within this teacher research group, along with the conflicts and interchanges among the participants, demonstrates that there are important divisions within the teacher research movement that are intellectually creative and socially important. (Contains 42 references, eight notes, and three figures which present a synthesis of the commonalities and differences among the three positions.) (RS)

Prior research on dropouts has often focused on high schools and examined the issue from either the individual perspective or the institutional perspective. Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey of 1988 and a new form of hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), this study focuses on dropouts from middle school and examines the issue from both individual and institutional perspectives. At the individual level, the results identified a number of family and school experience factors that influence the decision to leave school, with grade retention being the single most powerful predictor. But disaggregating the analysis also revealed that there are widespread differences in the effects of these factors on White, Black, and Hispanic students. At the institutional level, the results revealed that mean dropout rates vary widely between schools and that most of the variation can be explained by differences in the background characteristics of students. But restricting the analysis to lower SES schools shows widespread differences in both mean dropout rates and social class differentiation among such schools. Moreover, much of the variation among those schools can be explained by social composition of students and by several structural features of schools and school climate.

Designed as a basic resource document for public policy makers and school finance program planners, this final publication of the National Educational Finance Project presents a variety of data and arguments to support the concept of increased public investment in elementary and secondary schools. Within the different chapters, various authors present an economic rationale that justifies this investment and provide educational finance data that document the need for a major commitment of public funds to education. Tax capacity and effort of the 50 states are examined, and sources of revenue to support the proposed educational expenditures are identified. Finally some guidelines are presented regarding the design of state school finance formulas that may better serve to equalize educational opportunity. (Author/JG)

Occupational socialization in schools is a known factor counteracting attempts at educating innovative teachers. In this study, findings are reported from a longitudinal study conducted among 357 students, 128 cooperating teachers, and 31 university supervisors from 24 graduate teacher education programs. Quantitative survey data as well as in-depth qualitative data were collected over a period of 4.5 years. Development of teaching competence was followed from candidates’ enrollment until their third year as in-service teachers. Occupational socialization in schools was demonstrated to have a considerable influence on the development of graduates’ in-service competence. However, evidence was also produced for an impact of specific characteristics of the teacher education programs studied involving the integration of practical experience and theoretical study. Implications of these findings for the design of teacher education programs and the conduct of teacher education research are discussed.