Career development is an inherently spiritual process. Yet many career development professionals and personal coaches shy away from any discussion of spirituality in their work. This places the career professional in a dilemma: How does one practice a spiritual occupation, but never discuss the central issue? To escape this dilemma, the author…

Psychologist Andrea diSessa coined the term "phenomenological primitives", or p-prims, to talk about nonexperts' reasoning about physical situations. P-prims are primitive in the sense that they stand without significant explanatory substructure or explanation. Examples are "Heavy objects fall faster than light objects" and "Continuing force is…

One of the major theoretical and practical developments in testing is latent trait analysis and item response theory. This report provides a guide for practitioners in understanding, evaluating, and using these developments to meet their testing needs. (Author)

Schools are managed with the wrong organizational model in mind. They are unique and cannot be governed by conventional management theory. This article describes schools as loosely coupled systems and describes what school administrators should be doing to be effective in such a situation. (Author/WD)

Adding mediation (guidance in problem solving) to an educational task enabled learning disabled sixth graders to produce superior performances compared with unmediated tasks. The author contends that focus on problem-solving skills is needed as much as emphasis on reading and perceptual skill development for learning disabled students. (CL)

Describes a sequence of instructional strategies for teaching writing, based on schema theory, to help young readers with comprehension and structure. The sequence includes "factstorming," categorizing facts, collaborative drafting, sequencing paragraphs, drafting introductions and conclusions, organizing parts, interpreting similar…

Presents background on the aesthetic experience which can be developed into curriculum content for teaching aesthetic literacy at the elementary and secondary grade levels. (Author/SJL)

An administrator needs both counseling and communication skills in emotion-charged conferences with parents, teachers, and students. (JM)

Focuses on the contribution of the "Journal for Research in Mathematics Education" to the view of learning and teaching elementary school mathematics embodied in current curricular recommendations for school mathematics. (23 references) (MKR)

It is argued that linguistics is relevant to the teaching of English despite the prevailing skepticism about its usefulness. The relationships between linguistics and language pedagogy are explained. (Contains 19 references.) (LB)

This column introduces issues in research and practice concerned with assistive technology for students with disabilities including delays in transferring research findings into practice and ways to integrate what is known about research, effective practice, teacher professional development, and change. (Contains 14 references.) (DB)

Although its origins have been traced back much further, research in the area of learning style has been active for--at a conservative estimate--around four decades. During that period the intensity of activity has varied, with recent years seeing a particularly marked upturn in the number of researchers working in the area. Also of note is the…

Community organizing for school reform is a growing national phenomenon, as young people, parents, neighborhood residents, and faith-based institutions struggle to improve the quality and equity of public schooling, particularly in urban school districts. Now a decade old, community organizing projects are influencing local public schools in…

We are entering a new phase in learning about childhood disabilities. While we have found out much of what we need to know about their causes and aetiology, solutions to many of the challenges we will face in the future will come from the evidence base held by practitioners. Practitioners are ideally placed to carry out "real world" research but…

The 21 essays in this book interrogate one another as they explore the relationships among politics, curriculum, and pedagogy in contemporary classrooms and cultures. Critical theory, the book suggests, is generated in and through classroom practice, rather than imported from without. After an introduction by James F. Slevin and Art Young, essays…