The Gangstas in Our Midst

While conducting this ethnography on 50 male African-American gang members, I sought to create a picture of the culture in which these young men existed. Over a two-year period, I observed and interviewed members from such groups as the Bloods, the Crips, and the Blackstone Rangers in order to uncover the values, language, and rituals that defined membership in a gang, as well as the reasons why these males joined these groups in the first place. For the majority of these males, an education was not something that they thought would help them survive in their neighborhoods. One unexpected element that emerged during this project centered on the factors that helped 11 of these gang members begin the process of escaping gang life. What they received from their families, teachers, and peers to help them succeed mirrored the same factors that were often missing in the lives of the other 39 informants.     

Teacher Knowledge and Skill Assessments and Teacher Compensation: An Overview of Measurement and Linkage Issues

This article summarizes the conclusions that the authors have drawn about the measurement quality and potential for linkage with teacher pay of three sets of teacher assessments—those developed or being developed by the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium, the Educational Testing Service, and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. To investigate the feasibility of using these assessments as a framework for a knowledge- and skill-based pay system, the Consortium for Policy Research in Education commissioned a set of papers for a conference in September 1997 on the measurement issues involved in assessing teaching practice to standards and linking these assessments to pay for knowledge and skills. The resulting papers, revised and published as articles in this journal, show that this approach is promising but that in some cases additional research on the measurement quality of the assessments is needed.     

Applying mathematics with real world connections: metacognitive characteristics of secondary students

This paper reports an intensive study of problem-solving activity of female students at the senior secondary level. The study focussed both on the mathematical processing and the underlying cognitive and metacognitive activities that led to that processing. Response maps were used to analyse and categorize the written responses from individual students while videotaped problem solving sessions and structured and free response interviews probed the students' metacognitive knowledge, strategies, decision making, beliefs and affects. Metacognitive activities were involved in all phases of the solution process with key points in students' solutions identifiable in terms of the cognitive-metacognitive framework of Garofalo and Lester (1985). On average more time was spent on orientation and execution activities with little time being spent on organisation and verification activities, however, the successful groups spent less time on orientation than the other groups. All successful groups displayed a high number of key points where metacognitive decisions could influence cognitive action. Success was accompanied by a tendency to engage in a high number of organisational activities, regulation of execution activities and evaluation activities particularly evaluation of execution but fewer opportunities where metacognitive decisions could influence cognitive actions during orientation.