The Attitude Toward Writing Inventory, is a simple, Likert-type instrument designed to assess students' positive, neutral, or negative attitudes toward writing. This instrument helps to identify the negative attitudes which must be changed before an instructional method can be effective. (CB)

Fuller, physicist, educator, and director of the University of Nebraska's ADAPT (Accent on Developing Abstract Processes of Thought) program discusses ADAPT in terms of its interdisciplinary, reasoning skills, and mastery learning orientation; university support; plans; student testing; achievements; and faculty training in Piagetian theory.…

Using a special module (MEUS) of the 2000 General Social Survey, we investigate Americans' perceptions of the racial and ethnic composition of the United States. We show that, because of innumeracy, it is critical to gauge perceptions through relative, rather than absolute, group sizes. Even so, it appears that, as of 2000, roughly half of…

Accountability and performance incentive plans in education are compromised by goal distortion, gaming, and corruption. Education policy makers who design such plans have paid insufficient attention to similar experiences in other fields. This paper describes institutions in health care, job training and welfare administration, and in the private…

Between September 2003 and December 2004, the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) and Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund (Lambda) organized Regional Listening Forums in 13 different cities around the country. The objective of these events was to highlight the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth…

The overall issue of assessment during early childhood, and its relation to school readiness and other decisions, is currently widely debated. Expanding early childhood education and child care enrollments, better scientific knowledge about early childhood development, and decisions about public spending, necessitate careful consideration of which…

This article unravels the political, public, and private discourse shadowing Mexican immigrants in the Southwestern U.S. The author illustrates how the dominant discourse with regard to immigration in the U.S. has led to the dehumanization of migrant people significantly impacting what occurs in their daily lives and directly influencing the…

Ways of improving recreational services to handicapped people are suggested with the aim of broadening their interests and horizons. (JD)

Educators have at their disposal a large and substantive library of literature that defines and describes the attributes of highly effective leaders. Ashforth (1994) and Blase and Blase (2002) point out that, although volumes have been written about effective leadership, there has been surprisingly little discussion and research dedicated to…

Society's pervasive negative attitude about disability--which the author terms ableism--often makes the world an unwelcoming and inaccessible place for disabled people. An abelist perspective asserts that it is preferable for a child to read print rather than Braille, walk rather than use a wheelchair, spell independently rather than use a…

This article identifies some of the frustrations felt by a classroom practitioner as a result of the restrictions generated by current demands for accountability, and the limiting effect these can have on children's learning experiences. It goes on to consider the liberating impact of a more organic way of organising the curriculum, which allows…

This document describes an innovative pilot project of peer counselors, implemented within the structure of an educational support service. A peer counseling project created by the Athletes Educational Planning Program of the University of Toledo (Ohio) Counseling Center is presented, in which student-athletes help other student-athletes to adjust…

In this paper, a college professor applies existential philosophic thought to his "everyday teaching practice." He points out the stifling effects of working within a bureaucratic school organization. He presents personal experiences in dealing with the problems encountered daily in the classroom. The professor believes it is possible to, in the…

Describes an intergenerational, interdisciplinary program for older adults and middle school students. Reviews program goals and benefits to both groups. (ABB)

Describes the strategies used by the Catalog Instruction Group at the university library which, in less than two months, managed to reverse negative staff attitudes and reach large numbers of library users with information about the combined card and microfiche catalog system. (RAA)