Describes a two-year university/public school grant-funded collaborative research project designed to help teachers learn to use multimedia and telecommunications in the classroom and to develop culturally relevant curricula for students in a primarily Hispanic, lower income community. Goals were developed in four areas: collaborative design;…

Describes the Teaching Enrichment Activities for Minorities (TEAM) project designed to give minority students in Dade County (Florida) elementary schools experience in the type of thinking skills that are required for placement in gifted and advanced programs. (FMW)

Explores the use of ability grouping as a guideline for educational decision making. Ability grouping is often detrimental because it may foster segregation and poor teaching and lower students' self-esteem. Some studies demonstrate a slight positive effect on achievement. Higher ability students may derive more academic benefit from grouping.…

We present a review of an after-school program that has been running at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York for the past 5 years. The program is unique among after-school activities for high school students in several ways. First, it deliberately focuses on students who do not excel in science and math courses and…

Black and Hispanic high school students enroll in Advanced Placement (AP) courses at approximately half the rate of white students. This paper develops a microeconomic model of the AP participation decision and finds that low income is the single most important factor behind the minority AP participation gap. In addition, minority students enroll…

The United States has long been concerned with providing equal, quality education for all its citizens. With state-granted equity funding to needy districts comes the responsibility of wise use of equity monies. This study is an example of how three New Jersey districts invested their equity funding in a highly effective early literacy…

This study examined the effectiveness of curriculum-focused diversity initiatives on a college campus by determining the relationships between GPA, social class, year in school, residential status, racial diversity courses taken, and cross-racial friendships on the level of social distance between Whites-Blacks, Whites-Hispanics, Hispanics-Whites,…

This report uses a unique set of data obtained from the Kids Integrated Data System (KIDS), which is housed at the University of Pennsylvania's Cartographic Modeling Laboratory. The KIDS system merges individual-level data on young people from the School District of Philadelphia and the city's social service agencies, including the Department of…

The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, it reports on a study of the distribution of reform-oriented instructional practices among Black, White and Hispanic students, and the relationship between those practices and student achievement. The study identified many similarities in instruction across student groups, but there were some…

As part of a study of racial relations between Mexican Americans and Anglo Americans in rural Idaho, over 60 teachers, school administrators, and students were interviewed in educational institutions in five southwestern Idaho communities. One high school was the focus of field research, which also included attending school activities and school…

In 1993-94 the Career Awareness Program for Bilingual Haitian and Hispanic Students (Project CAP) was in its fifth and final year as an Elementary and Secondary Education Act Title VII project. Project CAP operated at two high schools in Brooklyn (New York), serving 136 Haitians at one and an undetermined number of Spanish-speaking and Haitian…

This chapter focuses on the innermost level of Bronfenbrenner's four-level conception of the human environmental ecology, namely the microsystem, and more specifically, the child's socialization in the family. Following discussion of concepts related to socialization, competence, and environmental ecology, selected research studies are reviewed to…

As Mexican Americans are the largest language-minority population in U.S. public schools, an investigation of literature that authentically reflects Mexican American students' cultural experience is necessary for any teacher. This chapter outlines strategies for integrating Mexican American children's literature into the structure of a classroom…

Although Mexican Americans are the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, their history and literature are seldom taught in American classrooms. A study of over 3,000 high school sophomores in the Southwest revealed that neither Anglos nor Hispanics were aware of the contributions of Mexican Americans. Incorporating Mexican American…

A study investigated the effects of home language and some bilingual instructional practices on language minority or bilingual secondary students' learning of English as a second language. Subjects were 17 teachers and their students from 12 secondary schools in an urban school district with a high Hispanic enrollment. Teachers were observed for…