Promoting Adolescents' Comprehension of Text (PACT) is a text- and discourse-based set of instructional practices that engage students with disciplinary texts as a means of building content knowledge and improving reading comprehension. PACT)s "efficacy" has been the subject of extensive previous trials. The purpose of this study was to…

States have been restructuring their U.S. history state assessments to include literacy-intensive reading and writing assessment items that have the potential to evaluate students' historical literacy skills in high-stakes testing environments. The purpose of this study was to explore how the restructuring of a U.S. history state assessment with…

Corn clubs played an important role in improving agriculture at the turn of the 20th century. Corn clubs were local organizations consisting of boys who cultivated corn on one acre of land under the supervision of a local club leader. The purpose of this historical research study was to document the organization, operation, and outcomes of corn…

The authors examine the ecological foundations of the thesis of a "code of honor" as an explanation for southern homicide. Specifically, they consider the effects of indicators of ethnic groups that migrated from herding economies (the Scotch-Irish), cattle and pig herding, and the relative importance of agricultural production across…

Action research includes a variety of methods engaged in by practitioners who wish to learn more about their work and the possibility of constructively changing it. This paper describes an action research dissertation project that focused on the work of a group of community activists to construct new understandings of their work and, as a result,…

A study investigated whether legislative intrusions on institutional autonomy have increased by examining all higher education acts passed during 1900-1979 in Washington, Idaho, Tennessee, and New Hampshire. One quantitative and one qualitative measure of change were used. Overall, no significant change in legislative stance toward institutional…