For many years educational practitioners have tended to focus on issues within the child for the causes of special educational needs and or disabilities. However, as the field has developed in professional maturity, a more inclusive approach has now tended to look beyond the child themselves, and recognise that often the cause of the child's…

An emerging body of research in the sociology of sports has captured how black males' academic identities become subsumed under an athletic identity. This body of research, unfortunately, focuses heavily on black male students at the college or university level and offers little empirical insights that probe academic and athletic related issues…

Explanation pertaining to individuals' cognitive development and learning approaches is a recurring theme in the areas of education and psychology. The work of Okagaki (e.g., Okagaki, 2001; Okagaki & Frensch, 1998), for example, has provided both theoretical and empirical insights into the structuring and situational positioning of individuals…

Data gathered as part of a media criticism project involving 109 New England daily newspapers were reanalyzed to discover community and organizational determinants of press performance. A content analysis of essays written about the region's press was used to obtain empirical indicators of press performance. The findings suggest that management…

The 1978 contract negotiations between the teachers and the school board of Philadelphia were important enough to draw in four identified types of third party: government officials (notably the mayor), neutral mediators, community interest groups (representing political, financial, parental, and general public interests), and the news media. The…

This paper outlines current changes in American adoption practice and the controversies surrounding these changes. It includes a discussion of the role that neo-Kantian and utilitarian perspectives have played in American adoption policy and practice, and offers an alternative, the communitarian perspective, described by Sandel (1984). Adoption…

In order to assess relationships and problems in drawing conclusions regarding productive school practices, a study analyzed the 1984 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data on homework and reading achievement among 13-year-olds. A previous study (Lange, 1987) examining the NAEP data set concluded that the number of hours spent on…

The goal of this panel was to generate scientific knowledge on how the organizational, administrative, physical, personal, and social aspects of the classroom, school, district, and community support instructional personnel in reaching educational goals. A matrix was developed using locational variables (within school and outside school) and…

This paper presents a rationale for studying the effect of a community's news media resources on the diversity of topics that the public considers important (the agenda). Research on media effects has followed a model that implicitly assumes that the important effects consist of the persuasion of individuals to adopt specific positions. This paper…

It is difficult to develop a measure of diversity in broadcast programing, and it is equally difficult to measure the value of a broadcast to its viewer. Similarly, attempts to measure viewer preference functions have resulted in categorizations so vague as to be meaningless. In the face of such ambiguity, attempts by the Federal Communications…

A decline in the daily reading of newspapers has been observed in the United States since World War II. In the decade from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, most daily newspapers employed market research to document and diagnose trends in readership, to estimate their present and future audiences' composition, and to assess the audiences'…

The purpose of this research was to study a school district in a small American city to understand who controls school curriculum in the local community. The research approach used was reputational analysis, a survey method whereby the reputed influence of leaders is measured rather than taken for granted. Also used was a technique developed by…

Discussed is the apparent tension that school administrators may experience between community demands for administrative compliance on the one hand and the personal imperative for defensible moral action on the other. The paper uses conceptual analysis as its method, informed by discussion of practical administrative situations. The first part of…

This paper discusses a proposed term project for a course in documentary photography that centered on photographically documenting a rural community and measuring its symbolic sociodramas. The paper describes the focus of the project, which was to determine how various community groups interpreted a given set of photographs designed to express a…

The League of Schools Reaching Out is a national project to show how family/community/school partnerships can contribute significantly to school restructuring. It aims to increase the academic and social success of all children, especially those society labels as at risk. The league is attempting to expand the notion that the internal methods,…