Perhaps the most maligned group of people in the United States, atheists and other nonbelievers (e.g., agnostics and freethinkers) reside everywhere and are employed in every field. Disclosure of nonbelief generally imposes costs, such as alienation from family and associates or even loss of employment. As a result, nonbelievers often disguise…

This case study focuses on a four-district collaborative that shared services for more than 15 years in an effort to retain rural schools and thereby to preserve community identity. With population losses in the four districts and suburbanization in the largest, the collaborative made extensive use of distance education in addition to itinerant…

Based on survey responses from more than 500 third-grade teachers, this study addressed three research questions relating to technology integration and its impact in rural elementary schools. The first analyses compared rural with non-rural teachers, revealing that the rural teachers had more positive attitudes toward technology integration. Then…

Computers are now a ubiquitous part of US elementary school education. With policy reports suggesting that inequities in information and communication technology (ICT) access across US schools are a thing of the past, investigating how such resources and their use may nonetheless continue to vary becomes all that much more important. Through a…

This reprint of an article on how one rural school district was able to use effectively a variety of acceleration strategies in different elementary schools is preceded by a commentary that stresses that the form of programming is less crucial than the training and attitude of the participating teachers. (Contains 3 references.) (CR)

As part of a larger study, variables that significantly influenced the grades of young girls were investigated. The sample included 52 middle-level girls (grade 7), all of whom were participants in a project examining factors that support or inhibit rural and urban girls' participation in science, mathematics, and technology. Preliminary analyses…

Rural schools, like others in the nation, are enjoined to use national and state standards as the basis for educational reform. Moreover, national standards for mathematics education were established early (1989) and have been disseminated widely. Nevertheless, little is known about the dynamics of standards-based reform of mathematics in rural…