Austin Independent School District provided full-day prekindergarten to 5,196 4-year-olds in 2008-2009 at 66 schools. Seventy percent or more of students made measureable gains on a test of receptive vocabulary, and average gains showed growth about two times greater than that expected for 4-year-olds after a 7-month period.

This study examines recent initiatives in the Irish Republic to integrate ICT into the primary school system. The study includes an analysis of the social, political and educational background to past initiatives, both government and teacher-led, to make more use of ICT in the general school system over the past 30 years. The government's…

The conversion of an "old school bus" in the late 1960s into a mobile library is discussed. The conversion was an element of educational service developed cooperatively between a regional educational laboratory and a rural school system. The project endeavored to improve the early experiences of future students, many of whom would have…

A new Sacramento State University Urban Teacher Education Center (UTEC) is located at Jedediah Smith Elementary School, a highly diverse urban school whose students come entirely from two federally subsidized housing complexes. This paper documents the integration of UTEC into the school and its community, including descriptions of the initial…

This report summarizes evaluation results of the AISD state-funded Optional Extended Year Program for 2002-2003.

This research was done to find out the present communicative qualification of parents with students. Through the research, parents of primary school V. grade students were chosen for sampling. Data have been collected with "the scale of instructional communicative qualification of parents" that its reliability and validity study have…

Less is known about how children read connected text in silent reading, and the range of reading strategies used in an ordinary primary school classroom, than about the reading of single words, oral reading and reading by skilled adults. This paper describes and evaluates a method of testing children's silent reading in which they are their own…

This study was an investigation of a microcomputer system which was developed to administer, score, analyze, and produce a written report for the Peabody picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R). The variables of reliability, age, gender, level of previous experience with microcomputers, preference for manual or computerized test administration,…

This report summarizes Austin Independent School District's (AISD's) Account for Learning evaluation report and action plan for 1999-2002.

A growing body of evidence indicates that the test scores of low-income children drop significantly relative to their higher-income counterparts during the summer months. This study finds that a well-implemented summer learning program can improve reading skills and increase the extent to which parents encourage their children to read during the…

This report describes how results from the Austin Independent School District (AISD) Student Climate Survey are related to academic achievement in AISD.

Teachers attending a 5-week in-service retraining course completed a survey asking them to rate their current competencies and training needs in 24 variables (N = 210). Intuitively, teacher competencies and their perceived needs of retraining should be negatively correlated. However, the correlations between teacher competencies and perceived…

This study conducted a review of the literature related to the use of the Internet for general classroom teaching and, more specifically, for the teaching of social studies. The study first focused on three questions: what research is being conducted on defining best practice related to the use of the Internet, what is the impact of various types…

Extensive reading (ER) programs involve students in silently reading large quantities of materials. These materials are usually at a level that permits students to gain at least a fair understanding of what they are reading without outside help. Such programs' benefits for first- and second-language (L1 and L2) learners are well documented (Coady,…

This report presents evaluation findings regarding the implementation and effectiveness of the Academics 2000, Cycle VIII grant in AISD during the 2001-2002 school year.