This document-based historical study looks back at the early years of the social foundations of education program that originated at Teachers College, Columbia University, in the 1930s-1940s, and focuses on the sociopolitical, intellectual, and educational currents that helped bring it about. Drawing on archival materials and published monographs…

This study presents an analysis of the consequences for students when performance assessment and differentiation practices are combined, as part of attempts to increase minimum standards within upper-secondary schooling. Recent standards-based curriculum reform in Australia demonstrates how a focus on minimum levels of achievement can limit the…

Basic reading comprehension and summary tend to be the focus in social studies and history classrooms, if reading and writing are included at all. But such a focus inhibits a conception of history as an interpretive discipline grounded in evidence that is analyzed, not simply accepted. Understanding the past is impossible without such historical…

How do democratic practices relate to social justice in our classrooms? What risks to social justice might democratic classroom discussions pose? In this article, I respond to these questions by drawing upon educational scholarship and data from a qualitative study in four U.S. secondary classrooms on the meanings and implications of teaching for…

Information collected through firsthand observations, interviews, and questionnaires from such sources as administrators, teachers, students, board members, and other community members is the base of a study of the relationship between school and community in a rural setting. (Author/MLF)

Adolescents are taught, through the students' confrontation with the meaning of the Holocaust, specific values that will prepare them for their initiation into a democratic society. The content and methodology of this program are delineated, and the relationship between the program's pedagogical strategy and realization of its goal is discussed.…

An example of how quantitative research methods and qualitative methods can complement each other in the service of inquiring into classroom learning environments. (Author/MLF)

Reports an attempt to observe, describe, and account for the ways in which four teachers planned their curricula and explores the relationship between the teachers' perceptions of some of the elements in the planning process and the ways in which they go about their planning. (Author/MLF)

Discusses from a systems-theory perspective the goals and functions of secondary education--and conditions affecting its performance--in western societies. Suggests definitions of the fundamental choices facing schools and principles to guide educational reform. (MCG)

This article explores the origin of demands for school curriculum reform, discusses why some secondary school reforms last while others don't, lists prospects for current reforms, and suggests approaches and methods to improve the formulation of curriculum policy in the United States. Thirty-eight references are listed. (DCS)

Discusses the "American jeremiad"--a pervasive ideological theme portraying a national mission and our failures in achieving it--and the influence of this ideology on elementary and secondary education. (MCG)

"Galileo," a team-taught interdisciplinary course required of all ninth grade students at Francis Parker, an urban school in Chicago, was based on the life of Galileo and its dramatization in a play by Brecht. The principal theme was the relationship between observation and inference, and the conflict between scientific knowledge and established…

A study to assess the long-term effects of participation in a high school community service project during the years 1945 to 1949 is described in terms of reconstruction of the original program, methodology, results, and finally, suggested hypotheses and methodological recommendations. (Author/MLF)

This study investigated high school students' notetaking practices and compared them with expert notetakers. Reseaarchers found crucial differences between experts and adolescents. Induced prereading brings adolescent notetakers closer to the experts. (MD)

Examines the ways in which schools facilitate and reproduce structured social inequalities in Australian society. Shows that curriculum variations in state and private secondary schools produce graduates with radically different cultural orientations to school, scholarship, and social and occupational life beyond academe. Lists 35 references. (MLH)