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The community college is both important and controversial. It now enrolls 36 percent of all students in college. But there is much debate over whether it aids or hinders its students' socioeconomic attainment. This paper aims to measure the community college `s effects and to explain how those effects are produced. In the first section, I critically synthesize research comparing the effects of community colleges and the effects of other postsecondary institutions on educational attainment and economic success. I conclude that baccalaureate aspirants entering community colleges attain less educationally and economically than comparable students entering four-year colleges. But community-college entrants seeking only subbaccalaureate vocational training seem to get more education than if they had entered a four-year college. However, the research allows no conclusion on which type of institution best promotes the economic success of subbaccalaureate aspirants. In the second section of the paper, I develop a model of the factors that impede the educational attainment of community-college entrants who aspire to a baccalaureate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses functional assessment-based interventions (FABI) to support students struggling to negotiate the academic, social and behavioral demands of the classroom setting. FABI is recommended for students receiving special education services and exhibiting behaviors determined to be of serious threat. The paper offers six key reasons for implementing FABIs including addressing insufficient primary and secondary preventions, developing a knowledge base and training teachers.

Teaching sociological practice in Britain in the 1960's was carried out in `methods' courses which focussed on large scale survey techniques. Although in subsequent years courses have been broadened, there is still a clear conflict between the model of research contained in the syllabuses, texts and examination papers for these courses and sociological work as a whole. It is suggested that a reformulation of such courses to cover all aspects of research practice and the involvement of students in designing and carrying out their own research work would move it into the centre of sociology teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pierre Bourdieu has argued that class position is maintained over time through what he calls strategies of reproduction. But most reproduction theory deals primarily with the effects of schools on the working classes; the role of the dominant classes in the process is seldom studied. The inevitability of change requires that elites adopt and channel innovation to retain control over emerging forms of knowledge. In this paper we examine how private secondary boarding schools and their students have responded to the emergence of microcomputers. Using field data from visits to 48 private secondary boarding schools and survey data from a sample of 2,475 students, we analyze the nature of computer facilities, the frequency of use, and the social attributes of frequent users at such schools. We distinguish between symbolic and instrumental acquisition of cultural capital and consider the implications of our findings for class reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that previous research has overlooked structural and organizational factors as possible explanations of sex differences in the mathematics achievement of schoolchildren. In particular, we focus on ability grouping as a possible mechanism through which differential opportunities to learn mathematics are presented to males and females and as an instructional practice generating social-psychological processes that differentially affect students by sex. We test the argument on longitudinal data from a larger sample of students in fourth-through sixth-grade classes in both desegregated and segregated schools. The results show that sex is a factor in the assignment of students to ability groups: Males are more likely than females to be assigned to the high-ability group. Nevertheless, the analyses do not reveal an effect of ability-group level on growth in mathematics achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to uncover the mechanisms through which stratification in schools differentiates student achievement. Two types of mechanisms are considered: (1) technical conditions of differentially allocated instruction, and (2) institutional processes operating through symbolically defined categories. Using data from twelve first-grade classrooms, I isolated the instructional effects and found that they are both large and stable. Institutional processes account at most for a small grouping effect, which occurs early in the year but fades as the year progresses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although much has been written about the ineffectiveness of schools in imparting cognitive skills, there is little reliable knowledge by which to judge such claims. While the typical school-effectiveness study focuses on variation in educational outcomes between organizational units, there have been few studies which compared "school" and "non-school" populations. The purpose of this paper is to assess the contribution of formal schooling to cognitive development. Using data from the sophomore cohort of the High School and Beyond project, we compare patterns of cognitive development for graduates and dropouts over a two-year interval. With the effects of social background, sophomore test performance, and prior academic adjustment controlled, the aye rage difference in cognitive test performance that may be attributed to the effect of staying in school is about one-tenth of a standard deviation. Moreover, dropping out of school has its most severe negative effects on disadvantaged students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the development made by the "Sociology of Education (SOE)." In this article the author forwards his views on some important issues related to the journal. Although Sociology of Education does very well compared to other social science journals in indexes of citations to journals, the journal is trying to influence its reputational as well as its documentary standing. The journal have begun to dispel stereotypes about SOE as a one-paradigm ethnocentric journal. At the same time, it has the impression that it compete with the general sociology journals for education-relevant papers. Nevertheless, it is difficult to say how fast images of the journal are changing and how much it can expect to register that change in subscriptions. The submission rate is good, around 150 manuscripts, and, as a result of page limitations, we continue to reject more than 85 percent of the submissions. Furthermore, the author has been finding a much wider paradigmatic and geographic range in the character of submissions.