Examining the Success Factors of High-Achieving Puerto Rican Male High-School Students

This article works to dispel the myth that Latino urban high-school students are not capable of performing at high academic levels. Whereas much educational research emphasizes the academic underachievement of urban Latino students, this article counteracts this research by describing the four success factors that three working-class Puerto Rican male high-school students attribute to their high academic achievement. These success factors are: (a) the acquisition of social capital through religiosity and participation in school and community-based extracurricular activities, (b) having a strong Puerto Rican identity, (c) the influence of these students' mothers/sisters on their academic achievement, and (d) the potential for caring and sincere teachers and other school staff to influence high academic achievement. These findings have implications for Latina/o education and recommendations are provided.     

Keeping Both Hands on the Wheel: Integrated Basic Education Skills Training (IBEST) for Commercial Truck Driving

IBEST is an innovative program that integrates English language skills with an intensive vocational training program and culminates in eligibility for a high wage commercial truck-driving career. Participants gain language skills, college credit, and vocational skills. Effective partnerships, scheduling, and instructional approaches are discussed.     

Classroom community and possible selves: implications for midcareer teacher seminars

Much research examines professional learning for pre-service and beginning teachers. However, in midcareer, teaching satisfaction and effectiveness are challenged by decreased recognition and support and increasing stressors including isolation, accountability demands, mentorship roles, and personal/family responsibilities. Often, midcareer teachers (MTs) pursue graduate degrees to advance skills, licenses held, and achieve recognition. This qualitative exploratory study examined classroom community (CC) development across three graduate seminars for MTs. Increased CC was connected to course structures and instructor actions which supported teachers’ reflection upon practice and envisioning of possible selves. Personal/family selves, teaching selves, and academic selves emerged. The model developed connects CC, motivators, and enacted classroom practices to each set of possible selves. Findings suggest increased attention to campus-based graduate seminars as avenues for the development of trust, open dialog, reflection, strategy building, and improved classroom practice among MTs.     

Altruism in death: Attitudes to body and organ donation in Australian students

Health education, research, and training rely on the altruistic act of body donation for the supply of cadavers. Organ transplantation and research rely on donated organs. Supply of both is limited, with further restrictions in Australia due to requirements for a next-of-kin agreement to donation, irrespective of the deceased's pre-death consent. Research suggests health workers are less likely to support the donation of their own bodies and/or organs, despite recognizing the public good of donation, and that exposure to gross anatomy teaching may negatively affect support for donation. Attitudes to body and organ donation were examined in Australian students studying anatomy. Support for self-body donation (26.5%) was much lower than support for self-organ donation (82.5%). Ten percent of participants would not support the election of a family member or member of the public to donate their body, and just over 4% would not support the election of a family member to donate their organs, with one-to-two percent not supporting this election by a member of the public. Exposure to gross anatomy teaching was associated with an increased likelihood of consideration of issues about body and organ donation, whether for self, family, or the public, and registration as an organ donor. Exposure decreased participants' willingness to donate their own body, with those who practiced a religion least likely to support body donation. Gross anatomy courses provide an opportunity to inform future healthcare workers about altruistic donation, albeit with a recognition that religious or cultural beliefs may affect willingness to donate.     

The Effects of One versus Two Years of Intensive Reading Intervention Implemented with Late Elementary Struggling Readers

We examined the effectiveness of a researcher‐provided reading intervention with 484 fourth graders with significant reading difficulties. Students were randomly assigned to one year of intervention, two years of intervention, or a business‐as‐usual comparison condition (BAU). Students assigned to two years of intervention demonstrated significantly greater gains in reading fluency compared to students who received one year of intervention and the BAU group. Students in both the one‐ and two‐year groups demonstrated similar and significantly larger gains in word reading in comparison to the BAU group. There were no statistically significant differences between the three groups on standardized measures of reading comprehension. We discuss these results in the context of research with late elementary and secondary students targeting reading comprehension.     

Narrative inquiry in physical education research: the story so far and its future promise

At a recent international education conference, current life history and narrative research within Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) was criticised for its seeming inability to ‘produce anything new’ and for lacking ‘rigour’. This paper aims to respond to the criticism and to reassert the strengths of narrative inquiry in the current moment. It maps out narrative and life history research (published in English) carried out in PETE, illuminating a spectrum of narrative approaches and a richness of theoretical perspectives. It underscores the need for PETE scholars to acknowledge the broad range of philosophical assumptions about knowledge and how we come to know as this underpins all research, whether carried out within a qualitative or quantitative research tradition, and to develop a climate of mutual respect for these various positions if we are to avoid stagnation, hegemony or blind spots in our research agendas.     

Report to the President on the Use of Technology to Strengthen K–12 Education in the United States: Findings Related to Research and Evaluation

The Panel on Educational Technology was organized in April 1995 under the auspices of the President's Committee of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) to provide advice to the President on matters related to the application of information technologies to K–12 education in the United States. Its findings and recommendations were set forth in March 1997 in the Report to the President on the Use of Technology to Strengthen K–12 Education in the United States. This report was based on a review of the research literature and on written submissions and oral briefings from a number of academic and industrial researchers, practicing educators, software developers, governmental agencies, and professional and industry organizations involved in various ways with the application of technology to education. Its most important finding is that a large-scale program of rigorous, systematic research on education in general and educational technology in particular will ultimately prove necessary to ensure both the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of technology use within our nation's K–12 schools. Finding that less than 0.1 percent of our nation's expenditures for elementary and secondary education are currently invested to determine which educational techniques actually work, and to find ways to improve them—an extremely low level relative to comparable ratios within the private sector—the Panel recommended that this figure be increased over a period of several years to at least 0.5 percent, and sustained at that level on an ongoing basis. Further, because no one state, municipality, or private firm could hope to capture more than a small fraction of the benefits associated with a significant advance in our understanding of how best to educate K–12 students, the Panel concluded that such funding will have to be provided largely at the federal level in order to avoid a systematic underinvestment (attributable to a classical form of economic externality) relative to the level that would be optimal for the nation as a whole. This paper originally appeared as Section 8 of the report.