Studied the relationships between gender, social class, ethnicity, and school success using data from a large-scale longitudinal database, the Dutch Secondary Education Students Cohort. Results show that school success is not always predicted by expected additive or multiplicative effects of the different background variables. Discusses…

Describes how the Improving School Effectiveness Project has built on good practice in Scotland and elsewhere by using pupil questionnaires as part of the range of instruments for exploring school effectiveness and improvement. Discusses research issues concerned with measuring student attitudes in the context of school effectiveness and…

Examined the association between free meal entitlement (FME) and the socioeconomic characteristics of schools in Scotland using a national survey of school leavers (n=8,545). Results suggest that FME is an inconsistent measure of poverty and only a partial proxy for socioeconomic circumstances. (SLD)

Examined the correlates of within school socioeconomic gaps in academic achievement corresponding to subject areas across schools using data for 6,883 students from 148 New Brunswick, Canada, schools. Results show that within-school socioeconomic gaps were similar between reading and writing as well as between mathematics and science.…

Examined the effects of concept maps on the task-related variance components of Political Science performance assessments for 187 college students. Task variance components were unchanged across groups using or not using concept maps. But the person main effect components increased and the task-by-person interaction components decreased for those…

Investigated the study behavior used by students facing an open-book or closed-book examination. Results for 201 college students in Cyprus indicate that students preparing for a closed-book examination tended to postpone study at the end of the semester, focus on assigned texts, and memorize information. Students preparing for open-book tests…

Describes an application of multilevel modeling to repeated measures as part of an evaluation of Reading Recovery in 22 schools in England and multivariate models are applied to the within and between school aspects of the design. Results show Reading Recovery to be effective in the short term, but not the long term. (SLD)

A survey of 172 teachers of students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) investigated the extent of level system use in special education classrooms, characteristics of teachers and students who use level systems, characteristics of level system operation, teacher perceptions of level system effectiveness, and their satisfaction with…

A six-year case study was conducted on the impact of, and teachers' role in, the use of computers and the Mathcad program in mathematics instruction at a technical college. Results for 2 teachers and 51 of their students showed definite stages in the teachers' use of the computer technology. (SLD)

The eight chapters of this issue focus on the uses, issues, and implications of national and international indicators of educational performance. They explore progress in using indicators to inform policy decisions and describe the progress of selected countries in developing, analyzing, interpreting, and reporting indicators of educational…

The eight chapters of this theme issue use quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the nature and nurture of young participants in the mathematics Olympiad from five countries. Parallel studies are presented of winners from China, Taiwan, and the United States, along with descriptions of programs in Japan and Russia. (SLD)

The six chapters of this theme issue explore data collected by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement to investigate crucial issues in reading comprehension. Simultaneous analysis and conjunct analysis are used to examine models as structured combinations of factors in the search for relationships among…

The reception and dissemination of the Scandinavian "folkehojskolen" (folk high school) and the development of residential adult education in the Netherlands in the 1920s and 1930s are described, focusing on Hermien van der Heide as a cultural intermediary. The discussion is a historical case study of cross-cultural communication. (SLD)

Social problem solving, effectance motivation, and information processing were studied with 38 Finnish eight-year olds using the LOGO computer programming language learned through discovery learning. Results suggest that LOGO promotes the development of problem-solving skills if each student receives sufficient support from the teacher. (SLD)

Child and caregiver conversations were studied within a highly redundant caretaking routine in a preschool setting with six children and three caregivers. Results suggest that the hypothesis of predictability and semantic contingency are of relevance in explaining how children learn to talk about the here-and-now. (SLD)