In general, African American males lag behind their White counterparts with regards to high school graduation, college completion and beyond. African American males residing in low resourced communities are especially vulnerable for such disadvantage. Existing literature suggests that parental factors and interactions can help to promote youth…

Social science methodologies of intervention programming for college and career readiness, particularly in regard to evaluation, must be situated within a larger context of racialized readiness for college and career. The policy context for this argument is a state-level evaluation of college and career readiness legislation in Illinois using…

This article involved a series of investigations influenced by the Reggio Emilia approach to early education as well as ideas of Paulo Freire. Within a Reggio-influenced classroom, teacher professional development is seen as essential, whereas for Paulo Freire, both teacher and the student are learners. These 2 ideas were brought together in a…

Although an Illinois district had worked successfully with the Thoughtful Education model for instructional and curriculum reform, its tests still focused students' attention on grades. Using personalized learning principles stressing choice, understanding, motivation, engagement, critical thinking, and reflection, faculty created tests compatible…

Recent research on motivation and education has focused on the psychological environment of the classroom. Special consideration has been given to perceived stresses on goals, purposes, and meanings of learning activities and the relationships of these to motivation and achievement. The study summarized in this paper builds on this work,…

Recent research has indicated that a learning setting's "psychological environment" can make a difference in student achievement and motivation. This has been found to be true in the case of smaller learning settings, such as the classroom. Recently, research on school culture has suggested that schools do indeed differ in the kind of…

This report describes a program to use various instructional strategies to increase student motivation in the learning process. The targeted population was high school students in a multicultural, middle-class community in a suburb of Chicago (Illinois) with 1,926 students. The problems of low participation, off-task behavior, and inadequate…

This action research project evaluated a program of activities to increase the engagement of high school students in their learning. The targeted population consisted of freshman, sophomore, and senior students in a middle class community in central Illinois. The lack of student engagement that posed a problem in academic progress was documented…