Education articles from June 1995

Education archives from June 1995

Student apathy, lack of self-responsibility and false self-esteem are failing American schools.
June 22, 1995... For more than a decade, the media and the general public have been criticizing educational institutions for producing mediocre results, and the government has been pouring astronomical amounts of money into education in an attempt to improve...

Will to learn.
June 22, 1995... Recent Gallop Polls report that discipline, drugs and alcohol, and lack of student motivation continue to be identified by far as the largest problems in our schools., quality of teachers, financial support and the curriculum are consistently...

Thinking about methodology: student initiated active learning in reading and writing.
June 22, 1995... "One must learn by doing the thing: though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try (Publilius Syrus, first century B.C.E." In a passing conversation with a reporter for Re Buffalo News, he was asked how he learned his...

Reforming American education must include societal matters as well as educational ones.
June 22, 1995... Intense public criticism underachieving American schools and an ensuing outcry for school reform since the early 80's have been prompting educators to come up with a host of school programs or initiatives aimed at improving student...

The relationship between fitness test scores and activity among fourth grade students.
June 22, 1995... In past years, there has been an increased effort to perfect fitness testing techniques, measurement criteria and to identify acceptable standards of performance. Perhaps these concerns have been out of step with one goal of physical education...

Subjectivity in teacher decision making: underlying cognitive processes.
June 22, 1995... Reducing subjectivity is a desirable goal for decision-makers of all kinds - from military leaders to management personnel to individuals dealing with their day to day personal problems. But considering the varied and ambiguous nature of most...

Needed: an ethic of caring in our schools.
June 22, 1995... We live in a violent society. One that is cited by a Senate Judiciary Report as "the most violent and self-destructive... in the industralized world" (Steinberg, 1991, p.40). Daily, we are bombarded with reports of rapes, muggings, stabbings,...

Multidimensional self-concepts and achievement in African-American middle school students.
June 22, 1995... Researchers have devoted considerable attention to the relationship between self-concept and academic achievement in the general population (e.g., Hansford A Hattie, 1985; Liu, Kaplan, & Risser, 1992; Mboya, 1989; Pottebaum, Keith, & Ehly,...

California's history-social science framework revisited: a focus on implementation successes.
June 22, 1995... "By emphasizing history and geography and offering more in-depth thought-provoking units, California educators hope to enrich students, understanding of our nation and the world." (Alexander and Crabtree, 1988, p. 10). This was the vision...

Tips on how to turn life's setbacks into triumphs.
June 22, 1995... When life presents us with lemons, our job is to make "great" lemonade! To do so, however, we need to have the right recipe(s). What follows, therefore, are ten points to ponder (i.e., recipes) that should help us lead...

Toward clarification of confusion in the concept of percentile.
June 22, 1995... Precentile is a fundamental concept in educational statistics (Kendall & Buckland, 1971). Nevertheless, no agreement has been reached among textbooks regarding definition and computation of percentile. In this paper, four percentile...

Chaos theory and its implications for curriculum and teaching.
June 22, 1995... Anyone who has done any teaching knows that no formula, no rule, no theory ever works perfectly with every group of students. Our present scientific deterministic paradigm is based on the assumption that if you have preset goals written out...

A legal analysis of school searches.
June 22, 1995... A wadded-up looseleaf paper flew across the classroom. A seemingly typical classroom disturbance; however, on inspection, the crumpled paper contained marijuana. A student brushed up against another student en route to the pencil sharpener. A...

Learning styles in the Philippines.
June 22, 1995... Is there a distinctive learning style that characterizes middle school students of the Philippines, an archipelago of some 7000 islands in Southeast Asia? This study sought to find out. The Learning Style Inventory (LSI) of Dunn, Dunn,...

Practical strategies for facilitating classroom teachers' involvement in action research.
June 22, 1995... Recently, many authors have contended that one important way to promote the reform of schools is to involve teachers in doing research in their own classrooms (Casanova, 1989; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1990; McCutcheon, 1987; Sardo-Brown, 1990;...

School failures caused by personal goals of teachers and administrators that dwarf social ones.
June 22, 1995... America's educational system has been widely accused of failing the nation. The Public Television network evening news program of December 13, 1990, presented a panel of experts (including John Silber, Ross Perot, and Thomas Kean) who...

A paradigm for portfolio assessment in teacher education.
June 22, 1995... Educational reform is a prime task in the United States, and it is no doubt that assessment of teaching and learning at all levels is one of the major foci of this reform. While there may not be anything new or authentic about the techniques...

Outcomes of teacher participation in the curriculum development process.
June 22, 1995... Introduction Since the early 1980s, many educators have addressed the negative aspects of schooling in the United States and provided practitioners with various recommendations for how to improve them. According to Sikula (1990), the...

Making the right connection: conferencing with parents of different cultures.
June 22, 1995... Ann Smith is a white, middle-class female who teaches first grade. There are 28 children in Mrs. Smith's class, 15 children are White, 11 children are African American, and 2 children are Hispanic. In preparing progress reports early in the...

Strategies and knowledge in problem solving: results and implication for education.
June 22, 1995... How do individuals become more successful problem-solvers? How do they use what they know about specific domains or subject areas and how is this influenced by their problem-solving strategies? How does this vary by age? Recent research...

Tech prep and the development of personal qualities: defining the affective domain.
June 22, 1995... Introduction A recent and important trend in public school education concerns helping students develop the essential technological skills for them to become a part of a "world-class work-force,, (U.S. Government Report, 1991). Indeed,...

A proposed new symbolic model for modern education.
June 22, 1995... I want to propose an experimental plan that could prove to become the beginning of a renewal in our education today. And for such a renewal, I suggest that our first critical step is to be philosophical. We should not now think that in...

Educating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder children.
June 22, 1995... A large number of elementary school students have a condition known as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). This phenomenon creates problems for the ADHD student. other students in the classroom, and the teacher. The purpose of...

The case study approach to teaching in education administration and supervision preparation programs.
June 22, 1995... A case study is usually developed out of a real situation. Wassermann (1993) has developed "strategies for writing cases" for students and instructors that grow out of their own professional experiences. Sato (1991) stated that "most...

The school counselor as leader of efforts to have schools free of drugs and violence.
June 22, 1995... The sixth National Education Goal for the year 2000 acknowledges the problem of violence in the public schools and serves to direct our attention to its solution. It reads as follows: "By the Year 2000, every school in america will be free of...

Searching for second wave pedagogy: student perceptions of classroom practice.
June 22, 1995... Introduction Several writers have found that pedagogy in contemporary American schools is much the same as during the last half of the 19th century. Sirotnik (1983) and Goodlad (1984), for example, found that contemporary teachers...

The importance of promoting stakeholder acceptance of educational innovations.
June 22, 1995... Educators are continually responding to new information on how children learn by restructuring both educational environments (e.g., Kearns, 1993; Merina, 1993) and approaches to the instruction of various subject matter (e.g., Battista, 1994;...

Some types of children-at-risk.
June 22, 1995... That children today are growing up faster physically seems to be undebatable (Ware, 1991). This fact is repeatedly documented in the literature and is seemingly recognized by both parents and teachers. Unfortunately, however, "the earlier...