This project is an exploration of the benefits of a field-based pre-student teaching semester in which elementary education students work with college professors and practicing elementary teachers in a more holistic way than is possible with traditional campus-based courses. A group of twenty-six college students met four days each week, seven…

Despite the number of studies investigating affective aspects of test taking, little is known about how students perceive the kinds of extended performance assessments currently being developed for state and local testing programs. This paper presents two studies that address these issues. In the first, hands-on science tasks were administered to…

This paper presents a study to improve and enrich understanding of how the disclosure or non-disclosure of a lesbian, gay male, or bisexual teacher's sexual orientation at work influences his or her perceptions of job satisfaction and job stress. Consideration was given to the general level of job satisfaction and job stress among lesbian, gay…

This working paper examines funding to U.S. school districts and public schools in accordance with Chapter 1 of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 as amended in 1988. The report discusses the background of the legislation, describes its provisions, and presents results from the Schools and Staffing Survey conducted in…

This paper presents a case study describing the collaboration between a state university, a local school district, and Dialog Information Services, Inc. that was designed to include the use of online searching in a social studies methodology course and to encourage school curriculum reform in the area of technology by integrating online searching…

The Milepost Testing Program of the Los Angeles Unified School District (California) is described. The district's Ten Schools Program was designed as an intervention to raise student achievement in 10 historically low-achieving inner-city schools, with a minimum 60-percent African American population. The Milepost Testing Program was conceived of…

During the 1989-90 school year, Descubriendo la Lectura, a Spanish-language adaptation of the English Reading Recovery project was implemented in a large urban school district in Arizona. The program is designed to identify first-grade students at risk of becoming poor readers and to provide a series of intense short-term learning experiences that…

The relationship between success on proficiency tests and poverty has been widely discussed. This study explores the use of a neighborhood indicator of socioeconomic status based on school lunch participation of elementary school students in that neighborhood, and examines the relationship of poverty to success on a high school proficiency test in…

The theoretical and practice-based framework is presented for a study that explored the effect of teachers' use of alternative assessment on their mathematics teaching. A model for the impact of alternative assessment on teacher knowledge and classroom teaching processes is proposed, building on work by E. Fennema and M. L. Franke (1992) and P. L.…

This paper describes the experiences of several individuals involved in the initial stages of orchestrating a school-university partnership. A group of elementary teachers, a student teacher, a cooperating teacher, a university faculty member, and a coordinator of school-university partnerships participated in the experience and shared their views…

Findings from 20 interviews conducted with individuals involved in the California New Teacher Project, which is administered by the California Department of Education and the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, are reported to assess the policy environment for new teacher support and assessment programs. The study was conducted by the Southwest…

The Assessment Development Laboratory for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is developing a certification process with the three components of school site documentation, a content knowledge examination, and assessment center exercises. Activities involved in the development of the exercises and their scoring are described. The…

Six classroom research-based instructional projects funded under Chapter 2 are described, and their outcomes are summarized. The projects each used computer hardware and software in the classroom setting. The projects and their salient points include: (1) the Science Technology Project, in which 48 teachers and 2,847 students in 18 schools used…

The case study presented in this paper describes the thinking-in-action of a first grade teacher who, within the natural setting of her classroom, was constructing a new way of teaching language arts by changing to a whole language approach. In contrast to traditional implementation models, this study highlights the constitutive nature of…

Despite a high attrition rate among urban teachers, some have remained and have proven to be effective with the urban population of learners. This paper determines the perceptions of urban teachers and university faculty of the role of an effective urban teacher and compares these perceptions to the natural behavioral styles of candidates for an…