NCCRESt

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Instructional Effectiveness

• A Comparison of the Additive and Transformation Approaches to Multicultural Education
  This project compared the degree to which additive and transformational approaches to multicultural education increased children's understanding and appreciation of physically challenged children. The additive approach integrates ethnic content to the regular curriculum by adding content, concepts, themes, and perspectives without changing the basic structure, purposes, and characteristics.
• Advocating for Hispanic High School Students: Research-Based Educational Practices
  High schools can have a positive effect on Hispanic students' academic success by cultivating an advocacy-oriented school environment that implements effective practices in four areas: dropout prevention, effective instruction, psychoeducational assessment, and understanding and easing the acculturation process. Contains 47 references.
• Beyond "Multicultural Moments" (Middle Ground)
  Discusses how to teach students the values of "understanding, tolerance, caring, and respect," and to help them understand and appreciate cultures other than their own. Focuses on five levels: building a classroom library of multicultural literature; using "lit sets" (multiple copies of the same book) to promote multicultural understanding; the whole-class novel; interdisciplinary study; and beyond literature.
• Computer Use Levers Power Sharing: Multicultural Students' Styles of Participation and Knowledge
  This study investigated ways four elementary teachers learned to use technology in a way sensitive to cultural differences of their students. The most significant finding was that as teachers started using three to five computers in their classrooms, they shifted from large-group to small-group instruction.
• Cultural Competency Training at a Distance: Challenges and Strategies
  Televised instruction and a movement to integrate cultural-competency training into counselor education represent the convergence of two major forces in counselor training today. The challenges associated with providing cultural-competency training via interactive television are outlined.
• ESL Policy and Practice: A Linguistic Human Rights Perspective
  Finds that the reading performance of English-as-a-second-language students and English language learners immersed in regular education classes in a large urban school district was far below grade-level performance, across all categories of measurement; but that the performance of English language learners who had successfully exited from bilingual classes was consistently within or above the average range of performance. (SR).
• Follow-up of children from academic and cognitive preschool curricula at age 9.
  This study reports on cognitive, academic, and social outcomes at age 9 years for a group of 141 children who participated in two highly contrasting early intervention programs, mediated learning (ML) and direct instruction (DI). Consistent with results at the end of intervention, no main-effect differences between the two groups were obtained.
• Interactive Drama: A Method for Experiential Multicultural Training
  The authors present interactive drama as a medium to create learning about multicultural and diversity issues in the basis of cognitive-experiential self-theory. Results of exploratory qualitative research suggest 2 interactive dramas had an impact on awareness, understanding, and skills.
• Interactive reading instruction: a comparison of proximal and distal effects of instructional conversations.
  This study examined the effects of an interactive approach, instructional conversations (IC), on the language and concept development of Hispanic students with learning disabilities. This study compared traditional instruction (basal approach) with instructional conversations.
• Projecting the Voices of Others: Issues of Representation in Teaching Race and Ethnicity
  Discusses the practice of first-person accounts in curriculum examinations of race and ethnicity. Refutes the essentialist notion that only members of a particular group can address issues concerning that group.
• Raising Achievement for Asian Pupils
  Analyzes why ethnic minority groups, such as Asians, are achieving marginal academic success. Analysis of the management, pedagogic, curriculum, resource, and community issues indicates what political guidance might be effective to help improve academic achievement.
• Reading Researchers in Search of Common Ground
  Investigating what 11 eminent literacy scholars with diverse philosophies could agree to regarding contexts and practices for teaching reading, this book presents comprehensive analyses of these findings, dubbed the "Expert Study," and their implications. It includes a reprint of the 1998 article "Points of Agreement:.
• Teachers and Pluralistic Education
  Defines the concept of pluralistic education and discusses its goals. Interviews a number of teachers to investigate their conceptions of education and their response to the idea of pluralistic education.
• Ten Common Fallacies about Bilingual Education. ERIC Digest
  Although a growing body of research points to the potential benefits of bilingual education, there are a number of commonly held beliefs that run counter to research findings. Based on current research, this digest clarifies some of the myths and misconceptions surrounding language use and bilingual education in the United States.
• The Disproportionate Representation of Minority Students in Special Education: Responding to the Problem
  Identifies specific content that teacher trainers in special and general education should consider incorporating into preservice training programs in an effort to address the over- and underrepresentation of culturally and linguistically diverse students in special education programs. The fields of multicultural education and bilingual education are seen to offer effective practices and programs for diverse special-needs learners.
• The Rise and Fall of Diversity Training
  The effectiveness of diversity training in eliminating racial stereotypes in the workplace and modifying employees' negative attitudes toward diversity was examined in a study conducted at a private nonprofit college in the San Francisco Bay area.
• Towards a Consciousness of Language: A Language Pedagogy for Multi-Cultural Classrooms
  Describes a language pedagogy which can help basic writers to understand language's potential to shape, not just to convey information about, social experience. States that students from diverse backgrounds can then more effectively critique the relationships of language's uses in a variety of social contexts.