It is difficult to get a good grasp of the topic of kindergarten entry assessment because there are such great differences in the purpose for the instruments, how they are constructed, and how the data is used. Even so, in many states and communities, there is cause for concern. Until the paradigm of education moves from a preoccupation with…

With the tremendous job growth and economic boom on the Northern Plains, tribal colleges in Montana and North Dakota are initiating new innovative programs to address the region's workforce necessities. United Tribes Technical College (UTTC), Fort Peck Community College (FPCC), Aaniiih Nakoda College (ANC), and Cankdeska Cikana Community College…

The 2011 Children's Literature Assembly Workshop investigated cultural contexts and relevant issues in children's literature. Award-winning authors, illustrators, and an educator shared their thoughts about writing, illustrating, and teaching multiethnic literature. The panel included author Nikki Grimes, author and illustrator Eric Velasquez,…

Informal support networks as opposed to formal mental health counseling may represent a culture-specific, indigenous style of coping for Black college students. Using the African American Student Network (or as students refer to it AFAM), this article comments on the potential of an informal networking group as a culturally sensitive therapeutic…

Museum programs for working adults in their workplace groups are an interesting and important recent development. These programs have the potential to contribute significantly to the future health of museums. This article shows that these programs link to and build on three important trends in museums--customized experiences, deep engagement, and…

The emergence of and the attention given to culture in the evaluation field over the last decade has created a heightened awareness of and need for evaluators to understand the complexity and multidimensionality of evaluations within multicultural, multiracial, and cross-cultural contexts. In this article, the authors discuss how cultural…

This article describes the work of Oscar Lewis, Paul Willis, and John U. Ogbu, who used the concept of culture to explain the difficulties some children had in schools. Although Lewis, Willis, and Ogbu were well trained as ethnographers and their work influenced educators, critics complained that their explanations did not fit their evidence. The…

This article describes an initiative undertaken by a coalition of psychologists (Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education) from the American Psychological Association (APA) to identify the top 20 principles from psychological science relevant to teaching and learning in the classroom. This article identifies these principles and their…

Bourdieu's concept of habitus has increasingly been used in research in the sports coaching field and offers a useful concept for understanding how experience comes to shape coaching practice. In this article, we begin by outlining the use of habitus in the sports coaching literature and provide a brief description of it and its relationship…

The purpose of this article is to provide specific guidelines for child-centered play therapists to set behavioral outcome goals to effectively work with families and to meet the demands for accountability in the managed care environment. The child-centered play therapy orientation is the most widely practiced approach among play therapists who…

Social capital is an exciting and growing field in academic circles. However, its research has often been criticised by youth theorists for its lack of relevance to youth life and experience--the portrayal of young people as consumers rather than producers of social capital--and a failure to acknowledge the complexity of youth life. Many of these…

In this essay, author Steven Ciampaglia reflects on the creation of a guerilla art course he and a colleague designed to engage students in the process of creating contemporary art relevant to them outside the traditional classroom setting. He examines how reflecting on his teaching practices led him to rethink the key objectives and design…

Much has been written concerning the challenges many teachers face in engaging African American males in reading practices. While much of this extant scholarship focuses on African American males at the pre-adolescent stage of development and beyond, little has been written regarding increasing reading engagement in African American boys in P-5…

Social studies emerged at the core of the American common school in the mid-nineteenth century amid the rise of the urban immigrant receiving center. These two forces together resulted in the heightened importance of schools in transforming immigrant students into American citizens. Today, U.S. schools often serve as a social and educational nexus…

This paper synthesizes the end-of-semester prognostications developed over several semesters by students, goaded by their instructor, in the Introduction to Media course at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Contending with "Understanding Media" alongside a much more conventional Introductory text, participants have distilled…