Effective teaching and more efficient management can be achieved with little additional cost through initiation of a teacher-leader classification. Teacher-leaders will be skilled in designing, implementing, and evaluating inservice education; will provide a collaborative approach to staff development; and could also be the catalyst for reversing…

Knowledge of issues that include due process, discrimination, validity, reliability, and inference will assist school administrators in reworking evaluation systems to meet legal and ethical requirements. In so doing, systems become more research based, accurate, and of value in improving teacher effectiveness and providing defensible evidence for…

Undergraduate students completed a regular class test of 35 multiple-choice items, interspersed with five humorous verbal items written in multiple-choice format or selected syndicated cartoons. A questionnaire revealed that, although student perceptions of test humor were positive, they were less positive about verbal items. (Author/CM)

The value congruence between educators and students, and the effects of this congruence on student achievement were examined with a sample of 360 Mexican American students, 203 non-Mexican American students and 181 educators. The results indicated that value non-congruent students demonstrated higher achievement levels than value congruent…

Six single subject experimental designs (AB, ABA, ABAB, Multiple Baseline, Changing Criterion, and Multi-Element Baseline) are examined in terms of their scientific rigor and practicality for school personnel. Design use may rest with the research question posed, behavior measured, teacher and personnel attitudes, and degree of scientific rigor…

This review focuses on the influence of teacher anxiety on student achievement and suggests directions for further inquiry. Research has determined no mutually acceptable definition of teacher anxiety, therefore a variety of its aspects are examined, including teacher effectiveness and influence upon classroom climate.

This article elaborates on the misrepresentations in Nagy and Griffiths' review of Piagetian research (EJ 275 527). The limitations of their treatment of important methodological and theoretical issues is discussed. (Author/PN)

A rejoinder to Anton E. Lawson's criticisms of a previously published review article by the authors on Piagetian research is offered. (PN)

A meta-analytic synthesis of findings from 51 studies indicated that use of an individualized teaching system has only a small effect on student achievement in secondary school courses and did not contribute significantly to student self-esteem, critical thinking ability, or attitudes toward the subject matter being taught. (Author/PN)

This paper focuses on the nature of academic work contained in the curriculum of elementary and secondary schools, how that work is organized and accomplished in classrooms, and what modifications in academic work are likely to increase student achievement. (Author)

This paper first discusses methodologies employed in recent research on the composing process. It then presents results of that research in terms of the process and subprocesses of writing. It closes by discussing limitations of the methodologies and conclusions about the results. (Author)

To illustrate the principles of partial specification in writing research, six emerging paradigms of writing research are considered. It is shown that each of these paradigms makes contradictory claims as to what constitutes the principal causative context of classroom writing competence. The sociopolitical implications for these paradigms are…

A student self-report instrument was used with fourth- and sixth-grade students to collect data on eight classroom process variables and relate these factors to contextual variables--students' ages, sex, and socioeconomic status. Results indicate that students' perceptions of different teaching behaviors have distinctly different impacts on…

Preschool children received either play tutoring or skills tutoring in an attempt to determine (1) whether play tutoring increases children's verbal intelligence and creativity and (2) which factor--play or adult contact--is responsible for gains from play tutoring. Adult contact was found to be the chief reason for cognitive gains. (Author/PP)

Significant differences were found in the ways that good and poor fifth-grade readers used text lookbacks, sampling, and other text behaviors while tutoring younger students. Researchers recommend the tutorial methodology for externalizing metacognitive reading comprehension behavior and for research using error detection paradigms. (Author/PP)