Traditional School Settings Research Articles

Moral Reasoning in Behaviorally Disordered Adolescents from Alternative and Traditional High Schools

Very few studies have examined moral reasoning in students identified as having behavioral disorders and enrolled in a special education setting. Furthermore, little attention has been paid to the impact of alternative education programs designed for behaviorally disordered youth on moral reasoning development. This research examined the moral reasoning of behaviorally disordered adolescents enrolled in alternative and traditional high school settings. The results indicate that behaviorally disordered high school students enrolled in either an alternative or traditional school setting are significantly lower in moral reasoning compared to their non-behaviorally disordered peers. The moral reasoning of the behaviorally disordered students enrolled in an alternative setting is similar to that of like students enrolled in a traditional school setting. The correlation between time (months) spent in the alternative setting and moral reasoning is positive, but not significant.

Music, At-Risk Students, and the Missing Piece

At-risk students are those who are unlikely to succeed in traditional school settings. Guest editor Scott C. Shuler introduces this month's special focus and explains how music instruction can meet the currently unfulfilled needs of these students.

Authentic Texts and the High School German Learner

Many recent publications on reading in foreign languages have emphasized the advantages of and the potentials for the use of or in the foreign language classroom. Noted scholars in German pedagogy, namely, Byrnes, Kramsch, Swaffar, and Schulz, among others, have all argued eloquently that students in language instruction should be presented with natural or German from the beginning of their German programs. Byrnes, for example, argues that authentic are still the most preferable resource. Only by helping learners deal with can we reestablish the connection of language to its natural setting and purpose (183). In like manner, Schulz points out that especially for the traditional language major and the student preparing to study abroad, reading is probably the most useful skill, since most upper-level courses (in the United States or abroad) are based on the study of literary or informational texts (127). In addition to meeting the needs of learners in future language settings, Swaffar points out that the use of supports language acquisition. She states: sooner students are exposed to language, the more rapidly they will learn that comprehension is not a function of understanding every word, but rather of developing strategies for selecting and identifying multiple verbal and non-verbal cues, strategies essential in both oral and written communication (188).' Despite this considerable amount of clinical advice on the use of texts, few studies have been conducted that address the issue of actual student competence and capacity to deal with such texts. Many teachers, for example, acknowledge the importance of using and agree that student affect is much more positive when students finally get to read something real. At the same time, however, these teachers question whether their students can actually handle such texts. The intent of this paper is to approach the issue of and the extent to which they can be comprehended by high school learners of German in traditional public school settings with approximately forty minutes of daily instruction, five days per week. Specifically, the paper discusses a study conducted with high school students in their first through fifth years of German language instruction reading four separate texts. The data collected illustrate both in quantitative and qualitative forms the capabilities and competencies of high school readers of German and provide empirical evidence that buttresses many of the arguments advanced by the scholars mentioned above.

Action Research in an Educational Setting

The author entered a small community of black students who had dropped out of the South African education system and who were participating in the development of an alternative education programme. The purpose of the investigation was to identify (a) the factors believed to have played a major role in fostering alienation in the traditional school setting, and (b) the factors that played a part in the development of a psychological awareness of power in these students, during the 1976 Soweto riots and 1980 school boycotts, and during the alternative education programme. The findings of a multimethod measurement procedure were used as a basis for evaluating and developing the alternative programme in which the students participated, and for identifying educational practices aimed at enabling individuals to achieve a sense of personal power, thereby enhancing their social and psychological well-being.

Potentially Creative Adolescents View Their School Experiences

The expectation was that 62 potentially creative adolescents would exhibit attitudes that were more positive toward their school experiences in open school environments as compared with more traditional school settings. Attitudes were assessed by rating students' essays in which the adolescents described their educational experiences. The results suggested that potentially creative adolescents generally have positive attitudes toward their school experiences whether in open or traditional settings. Attitudes do not appear to be more positive in open school environments.

A one‐year follow‐up student adjustment from open to structured schools

This study is a follow-up of ninety-two students who entered sixth grade, forty-six of whom had a minimum of three consecutive years of open school educational training (grades 3, 4, 5) and forty-six with a minimum of three consecutive years of structured school educational training. Thus, one group (open-school students) had to make a major adjustment in classroom norms and policies while the other (structured-school students) had more continuity in their educational training. Because approximately seven hundred open-space schools were operating in the United States in 1975, it seemed plausible to investigate the impact of openness as an educational thrust on student behavior in a more traditional school setting.2 Acceptance of an open-school approach by educational decision makers, whether predicated on a Summerhillian philosophy or an alternative form of education, may not convey the more intense and more comprehensive meaning necessary for successful implementation of the program. Parents, teachers, and children must understand the more profound meaning of the approach; namely, self-initiated learning resulting from curiosity, fusion of subjects in the learning process, deemphasis of competition, reduction of fear of failure, and enrichment of learning through group activity. Seidman found that physical openness often is used interchangeably; however, no data exists to support this position.3 Kourilsky and Baker and Linder and Purdom describe the open classroom in terms of the range of independence in the learning process rather than mere physical movements of students.4 This description contradicts Morse's findings which revealed that parents, teachers, and administrators frequently mistake movement and interaction of teachers and students as representative of the open school concept.5

Perceptions of Open Schooling

Objective empirical research on schooling is sorely needed, but may encounter obstacles in the form of loose nomenclature. A recent study of the effects of schooling (Wright, 1975) purports to show that students in schools may achieve less and manifest more anxiety than their peers in traditional school settings. An adjacent article (Friedlander, 1975), which questions the appropriateness of measures Wright used, also questions the openness of the school setting used for Wright's study (which was open by virtue of few internal walls and family grouping of students). The point we wish to draw from the two articles is not that the particular school was or was not truly open, but that, because the term is used to describe such a variety of situations, openness is clearly not an adequate designation of any school or the program run within it. The investigation we report here is concerned, not with what schooling ideally is or ought to be, but with what public school practitioners believe to be important for its practical implementation. The results may serve to alert researchers and commentators to popular views of conditions and thereby prompt more attention to describing programs. Walberg and Thomas have undertaken several empirical investigations of what constitutes openness in terms of themes found in exhortations (Walberg & Thomas, 1971), in terms of teacher self-perceptions and in terms of observed instructional style of teachers (Walberg & Thomas, 1972). The aspects of schooling that appear in these studies are for the most part matters of instructional style of the teachers-the teacher diagnoses, guides, evaluates, solicits, and above all, appears to hold certain assumptions about the nature of learning and the learner. There remains the question of what, besides appropriate teachers, should be built into the implementation of an school. An opportunity to collect opinions on this question systematically was provided by a conference on schooling sponsored by the University of Minnesota.