This chapter explores early impacts from the Florida College system's bold experiment in making placement testing and developmental education optional for most students.

When they arrive at community colleges or open-enrollment universities, most students take placement exams in English and mathematics to determine whether they are ready for college-level courses. Students with low scores are referred to developmental--remedial--courses. Forty percent of all entering college students and over half of entering…

Background: Cluster randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…

This teaching experiment provided students with continuous engagement in a problem-solving based instructional approach during one mathematics unit. Three sections of sixth-grade mathematics were sampled from a school in Florida, U.S.A. and one section was randomly assigned to experience teaching through problem solving. Students' problem-solving…

Background: Cluster-randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…

The purpose of this quasi-experimental study examines the effects of reading interventions for bi-lingual and bi-dialectal Broward County School District middle school children using research-based strategies combined with metacognitive and meta-comprehension frameworks. The experimental study reports findings on the effects of an 8-week…

University education often suffers from a lack of an explicit and adaptable didactic design. Students complain about the insufficient adaptability to the learners' needs. Learning content and services need to reach their audience according to their different prerequisites, needs, and different learning styles and conditions. A way to overcome such…

Community college stakeholders are searching with increasing urgency for approaches with the potential to improve the success rates for community college students, particularly those in need of developmental education. "Learning communities," which place cohorts of students together in two or more courses for one semester, are a popular…

THE NOVA HIGH SCHOOL IS AN EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT TO MAKE LEARNING AND ACHIEVEMENT INTERESTING, CHALLENGING, AND EXCITING TO THE STUDENT. THE PROGRAM IS BASED ON THE CONCEPT OF INDIVIDUAL PROGRESS WITH EMPHASIS ON QUALITY EDUCATION. FEATURES OF THE SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT INCLUDE AIR-CONDITIONING, CARPETING, MULTIPURPOSE CLASSROOMS, INDIVIDUAL STUDY…

THIS STUDY WAS DESIGNED TO DETERMINE WHETHER SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES OCCUR IN MASTERY OF A COLLEGE COURSE LECTURE-DISCUSSION TYPE FOR FRESHMEN AND SOPHOMORES WHEN STUDENTS USE PROGRAMED MATERIALS OF INSTRUCTION RATHER THAN STANDARD TEXTBOOKS. FOUR STANDARD AND FOUR PROGRAMED SECTIONS WERE USED FOR COMPARATIVE PURPOSES. STUDENTS SELECTED THESE…

This basic aim of this paper is to explore and describe how the results of experimentation are transmitted from the "laboratory" campus to other campuses and to propose ways of improving and expanding the dissemination process. Chapters cover: (1) New College as a model, (2) "new" elements in New College's program, (3) the…

TEACHERS IN BIOLOGY, ENGLISH, HUMANITIES, MATHEMATICS, PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES AT THE UNIVERSITY AND AT VARIOUS JUNIOR COLLEGES IN FLORIDA TESTED THE VALUE OF ORIENTING COURSES TOWARD STUDENT PARTICIPATION AND AWAY FROM LECTURES. EACH INSTRUCTOR CONDUCTED ONE CONVENTIONAL COURSE AND ONE EXPERIMENTAL, LESS STRUCTURED COURSE COVERING…

The author plays off the use of acronyms in education in describing the work of the Southeastern Educational Laboratory (SEL). The SEL was one of the regional educational laboratories established by the U. S. Office of Education in the late 60s to assist in the improvement of public education. It served Alabama, Florida and Georgia. The author…