Educational achievement in rural America is one of the country's great overlooked challenges. Rural students achieve below the U.S. average on national tests, and high school dropout rates are higher and college attendance lower than they are in cities and suburbs. When the U.S. Department of Education asks low-achieving schools to be turned…

Policy discourses reflected in the World Declaration on Education for All (EFA) (Inter-Agency Commission, 1990) and the subsequent Dakar Framework for Action and EFA: The Quality Imperative (UNESCO, 2001, 2004), have called for the improvement of the quality of basic education. These discourses emphasize student-centered pedagogical approaches in…

This article explores the perspective of parents regarding their elementary children's writing in one rural, elementary school. During the research, thematic strands emerged indicating that parents may value their children's writing for purposes that differ from the purposes deemed appropriate by the school. Upon interviewing 30 parents/guardians,…

The objective of this study was to advance our understanding of educational effectiveness processes within contexts where they have seldom been studied before: rural and urban areas in China. Utilizing a "contextually sensitive" school effectiveness research design, we collected classroom observation data to address our research…

At its core the political push for full inclusion models of special education delivery derives from the belief that inclusion provides equal access, equitable distribution of resources and increased social opportunity to children. This study focused upon the evolution of special education programming within a pre-K to sixth grade elementary school…

South Korea has adopted the widespread use of digital textbooks. Part school reform and part an effort to prepare today's children for tomorrow's challenging world, the way in which this effort was implemented and the lessons learned are valuable. This article highlights the history of the digital textbook project and compares printed textbooks…

This paper discusses interactional patterns in classrooms in primary school in rural Tanzania, based on an ethnographic study on literacy practices. The paper argues that the official policy of Swahili-only in primary school, together with the huge gap between high expectations on educational outcome and lack of resources, have resulted in the…

Springboard Schools, originally called the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative, were founded in 1995 in response to the Annenberg Challenge--a five-year effort to improve nine urban school districts financed by the philanthropist, ambassador, and publisher Walter H. Annenberg. In 2003, the group, headed by Executive Director Merrill Vargo,…

The purpose of this study was to field-test several conferencing technologies in regional schools in Victoria to determine whether the technologies are appropriate for the needs of the university supervisor, trainee teachers and supervising teachers with regard to practicum placements. The study also explored the potential of technology for other…

In the action research project report, the teacher researchers found that many kindergarten and first-grade students did not have the reading readiness skills to be reading at their benchmark target. The purpose of the project was to improve the students overall reading ability. The dates of the project began on September 8 through December 20,…

Background: The literature on motivation suggests that student learning and performance is influenced by the motivational climate, and that positive benefits can be derived from exposure to a mastery motivational climate. Nonetheless, to date, only a few studies have attempted to investigate a mastery motivational climate in a naturalistic setting…

Efforts to improve the "quality" of education for all in government primary schools in India have seen a shift towards child-centred teaching. This paper examines the "Joyful Learning" programme, an example of a pedagogic reform implemented in rural primary schools in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Through an empirical…

With the advent of "Response to Intervention" there has been emphasis on preventing reading disabilities. This study examined the effectiveness of a classroom teacher Tier II intervention for struggling readers in kindergarten and first grade called the Targeted Reading Intervention. Three rural schools were randomly assigned to…

This paper reports on a qualitative case study undertaken in a remote part of Queensland, Australia. While there is some modest agreement about the capacity of contemporary information technologies to overcome the problems of schooling in areas of extreme remoteness, generally, children educated in such contexts are considered to be disadvantaged.…

This report presents selected findings from the Public School Teacher and Private School Teacher Data Files of the 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). SASS is a nationally representative sample survey of public and private K-12 schools, principals, and teachers in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. School districts associated with…