Response to Intervention (RTI) has been heralded by many as the long-awaited alternative to using a discrepancy formula for special education eligibility decisions. RTI focuses on intervening early through a multi-tiered approach where each tier provides interventions of increasing intensity. RTI has the potential to affect change for English…

The number of U.S. homeschooled students has steadily risen from the 1980's to the present, and many eventually choose to attend community colleges (Cogan, 2010; Mason, 2004; Ray, 2004a; Sorey & Duggan, 2008a). Homeschoolers who make community colleges their first structured educational setting outside the home do so for various reasons:…

With each issue focusing on different themes, volume 16 of "Inside English" looks at writing programs and critical thinking, developmental writing and the plight of part-time faculty, teaching literature and study abroad programs, and English as a Second Language (ESL) and English programs. In addition to regular columns on the English Council of…

An eye tracking experiment examined how exposure to a second language (L2) influences sentence parsing in the first language. Forty-four monolingual Spanish speakers, 24 proficient Spanish-English bilinguals with limited immersion experience in the L2 environment and 20 proficient Spanish-English bilinguals with extensive L2 immersion experience…

The author, an English professor, shares his experience in retaking the Graduate Record Examination in English literature, 25 years after he entered graduate school at the University of Virginia. He took the practice test instead of the "real" test, for a number of reasons. He wanted to be able to look over the questions afterward; to see what…

Student evaluations of university instruction have long been used to evaluate the teaching performance of instructors of all ranks. In spite of the widespread use of the data acquired from student evaluations for the purpose of determining faculty teaching effectiveness, a review of the literature in the area indicates that questions concerning…

This policy brief is the second in a series of in-depth case studies exploring how top-performing charter schools have incorporated civic learning in their school curriculum and school culture. This brief focuses on National Heritage Academies, a for-profit charter management company that runs 74 schools in Michigan and eight other states. NHA…

In 1992, a study was conducted to provide current institutional data on the number and percentage of underrepresented minorities among full-time faculty in two-year colleges; to examine the opinions of academic administrators about a number of barriers to minority faculty recruitment; to examine institutional efforts to recruit minority faculty;…

This study encompassed four different projects implemented in one urban College of Education. Projects included discussions in the faculty diversity self-study group, teaching and learning about culturally responsive pedagogy in an early childhood methods class, the use of fieldwork as a site for student learning about educational change, and…

This annual report contains six essays on current issues in higher education and a faculty salary report for 1996-97. The essays include: (1) "Faculty Salaries, 1996-97" (Suzanne B. Clery and John B. Lee), which notes that faculty salaries increased 3.1 percent for the year although the gap between the best- and lowest-paid faculty widened as did…

"Perspective" is a monthly e-newsletter presenting news and views from Achieve. This month's issue commences with a report stating how over the past five years, since the National Governors Association (NGA) and Achieve co-sponsored the National Education Summit on High Schools, states have made impressive progress in aligning their high school…

This report uses data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study of 1996 to describe the financing of undergraduate education in 1995-96, with particular focus on student loans and other types of financial aid. The report begins with an essay that describes the role of student loans within the context of tuition, the total price of…

As a part of the initial verification of the Concerns-Based Adoption Model, a two year cross-sectional/longitudinal study of the concerns of elementary school teachers about team teaching and college faculty concerns about instructional modules was conducted. The Stages of Concern About the Innovation Questionnaire was developed and administered…

This study introduces Expectancy-value motivation theory to explain the paths of influences from perceptions of test design and uses to test preparation as a special case of washback on learning. Based on this theory, two conceptual models were proposed and tested via Structural Equation Modeling. Data collection involved over 870 test takers of…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the influence of the generation born between 1977 and 1994, the "baby boom echo," on the demand for higher education and workforce development in Arkansas. Although the birthrate in Arkansas for this period does not correlate with the national trend, increased school enrollment and in-migration in the 1990s…