Although science and math are increasingly important in the workplace, many students, especially females, avoid these subjects. One route to the achievement of National Education Goal 3--increasing student competence in challenging subject matter--is through integration of vocational education with science and math, enabling students to apply…

Integrated programs provide students with a balanced mix of academic and vocational skills needed in the workplace and for lifelong learning. Basic skills in mathematics, science, and communication form the foundation for lifelong learning and the content for higher-order skills. Occupational skills depend on and do not exist apart from academic…

Many college faculty increasingly do much of their work, i.e., teaching, conducting research, and writing, in partnership with colleagues. This is due to such things as rapidly changing technologies and increasingly specialized knowledge. Faculty collaboration usually takes two principal forms, teaching and research, and are often distinctive…

This brief report summarizes a longer document with the same title. It reviews how college faculty are increasingly collaborating to do much of their work. It notes that the two principal forms of collaboration, teaching and research, are often distinctive arrangements depending on the field of study, institutional environment, and task…

Although most educators support the concept of integrating academic and vocational education and recognize the benefits it affords students, implementation of integrated curriculum and instruction is seen as problematical. One myth is that successful integration relies solely on teacher commitment and cooperation. The reality is that although…

To successfully reach out to a diversity of learners requires substantial support. The Digest addresses some sources of support intended as a complement to and a scaffold for teachers and administrators who experiment with different ways of meeting a diversity of learning needs. It highlights ways in which classroom teachers and learning center…

This digest presents recommendations for a staff development program for a multilingual multicultural teaching staff that has been tested and shown to be effective. Effective instruction in bilingual and multicultural schools requires that teachers combine a sophisticated knowledge of subject matter with a wide repertoire of teaching strategies…

As more states increase the number of credits required for high school graduation, progressively less time is being left for vocational education. To address this problem, many school districts and states are beginning to formulate policies for granting academic credit for basic skills training provided in vocational classrooms. As of 1985, 11…

One of the challenges facing many foreign language programs today is maintaining high quality instruction despite increased enrollments and teacher shortages. One strategy for meeting this challenge is collaborative teaching. Collaborative teaching can occur in various settings and for different purposes. Studies of team-teaching have shown its…

This report discusses three recent developments in foreign and second language education. The first is the "proficiency movement," which is leading teachers and curriculum planners to find effective ways of measuring functional language proficiency and of bringing students to pragmatically useful levels of speaking, listening, reading,…

Senior, high quality teachers can be retained in inner city schools despite limited resources and difficult conditions. Compared to teachers in suburban and rural school districts, teachers in urban systems often have lower salaries, work under greater bureaucratic constraints, teach more students per day, and lack basic materials. Good,…

Rural schools may have an advantage over urban schools in science teaching if sciences are perceived as means of exploring our surroundings, are presented as many viewpoints of one overall picture, and are taught in a form that deals with human situations. Collaboratively taught, rural science curricula can include study of agricultural ecology,…

This monograph explores the current use in higher education of cooperative learning, the instructional use of small groups so that students work together to maximize their own and each other's learning. The opening section sets out to define cooperative learning, and to look at the history of the technique, its basic elements, types of cooperative…