Teaching Advanced Skills to Educationally Disadvantaged Students. Data Analysis Support Center (DASC) Task 4. Final Report.

This document comprises six papers that discuss teaching advanced skills to educationally disadvantaged students. An introductory paper, "Models for Teaching Advanced Skills to Educationally Disadvantaged Children" (B. Means and M. S. Knapp), synthesizes the themes that characterize the collection of papers as a whole, and discusses general issues of implementation. The following papers are included: (1) "Learning Dialogues To Promote Text Comprehension" (A. S. Palincsar and L. J. Klenk); (2) "Teaching Writing to Students at Risk for Academic Failure" (M. Bryson and M. Scardamalia); (3) "Schoolwide Programs To Improve Literacy Instruction for Students At Risk" (R. Calfee); (4) "Using Children's Mathematical Knowledge" (P. L. Peterson, E. Fennema, and T. Carpenter); (5) "Thinking in Arithmetic Class" (L. B. Resnick, V. Bill, S, Lesgold, and M. Leer); and (6) "A Cognitive Apprenticeship for Disadvantaged Students" (A. Collins, J. Hawkins, and S.M. Carver). Each paper is followed by a discussion, written by an individual with extensive direct experience in classrooms of disadvantaged students. Educational practitioners are now being asked to address the more advanced skills of reading comprehension, mathematical reasoning, and written composition. The papers focus on providing practitioners with concrete, realizable models for teaching advanced skills to students in elementary and secondary schools. Fourteen figures are included. (SLD)