The Common Planning Time Project of the Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group (MLER SIG) of the American Educational Research Association provided an avenue through which researchers from throughout the United States could investigate numerous aspects of common planning time in schools. Although several studies have investigated…

Speech and language development in children are crucial for ensuring effective skills in their long-term learning ability. A child's vocabulary size at the time of entry into kindergarten is an early indicator of their learning ability to read and potential long-term success in school. The preschool classroom is thus a promising venue for…

One component of the United States' public school curriculum core is social studies. Since the No Child Left Behind Act (2001), elementary social studies has been marginalized, and in some cases, eliminated from the school day in favor of increased time for literacy and mathematics instruction. Kentucky's adoption of the ELA Common Core standards…

Across the United States, civic leaders from all sectors are working avidly to identify education and workforce strategies that can bolster regional economic development. One notable success story is found in Louisville, Kentucky, where a broad coalition of local leaders identified powerful educational improvement strategies and then successfully…

This paper describes a major initiative in the Commonwealth of Kentucky to develop a statewide, standards-based, student report card for reporting the learning progress of individual students at all grade levels (K-12). Led by a team of researchers with expertise in grading and reporting, 36 educators from three diverse school districts created…

This paper questions whether public concerns about educational quality and slow economic development in Appalachia are being addressed adequately and suggests that the problem of lagging educational performance is rooted in the social and economic environment within which schools operate. Recent high unemployment in south central Kentucky and its…

This study of Kentucky's 4th-grade NAEP reading scores was designed to: (1) describe progress from 2002-2007; (2) examine score gaps by gender, race, eligibility for free/reduced lunch, and 75th/25th percentile 2002-2007, (3) explore relationships between teacher-quality and 2005/ 2007 scores. The study, begun at 2007 NAEP data training, was…

HRD university curricula from seven online Master's degree programs are compared with their on-campus counterparts. With the exception of one university that does not provide a similar Master's degree program on-campus, curricula are identical in three universities, while curricula in three other universities differ in only one or two courses. A…

The Wilderness Education Association (WEA) helps people enjoy and protect the nation's most precious resource: the wilderness areas. The WEA has been training and certifying outdoor leaders around the world for nearly 30 years, teaching students safely and effectively to lead groups in the outdoors without harming the environment. This document…

Current interpretations of central Appalachia's chronic poverty focus on the region's economic dependence on the bituminous coal industry, controlled by absentee investors and serving an external market. Such theories overlook the ways in which the agricultural sector shaped subsequent industrial development. By analyzing the farm economy of 16…

Designed to help bridge the gap between selected Appalachian communities (17 control and 18 experimental Kentucky communities) and the more affluent U.S. society, the Appalachian Community Impact Project (ACIP) used indigenous paraprofessionals, backed by Extension personnel, to work at the community level. It was hypothesized that by using…

The need for a multidimensional approach to teacher education is discussed in light of the educational trends of the last decade, and the rationale behind Murray State University's (Kentucky) inservice teacher education program is explained. A short history of the university's involvement with inservice teacher education is given, and an outline…

This paper discusses dropout prevention and "Forward in the Fifth," an innovative program for school development in the Fifth Congressional District of southern Kentucky. The program focused on formation of a support group that could give school systems sustained financial and educational support from community and business leaders.…

This paper examines teachers' attitudes toward issues central to the establishment and functioning of professional development schools in Jefferson County, Kentucky. These issues are teacher effectiveness and teacher empowerment. Like the professional development school concept itself, the research reported is collaborative. Both quantitative and…

A study analyzed the evaluation orientations of 888 participants in Kentucky's week-long Management Awareness Workshop for state-employed managers who have occupied a management position for approximately 5-6 months. Analyses of responses to a self-administered mail questionnaire indicated 74.6 percent of respondents were encouraged by their…