With the escalating accountability requirements under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), educators face intensified pressure to increase student achievement. As principals strive to meet the demands of federal and state mandates intended to close the achievement gap, schools often implement various organizational structures to help improve student achievement. Changing how schools and classrooms are organized for instruction as a strategy for school improvement has been one response to this pressure. Elmore, Peterson, and McCarthy (1996) believed that changing the way schools are organized will cause teachers to teach differently; hence students will learn differently, and the overall performance of schools will increase. Many organizational patterns in elementary schools have been controversial issues for decades. One of these issues is the implementation of departmentalized classrooms in the fifth grade. Because many elementary students receive their education in a self-contained classroom from one teacher who is responsible for teaching all academic subjects, the implementation of departmentalization may address the pitfalls of the self-contained organizational setting. In the departmentalized setting, teachers provide instruction in their area of specialization and students experience greater success. Furthermore, departmentalization may help elementary schools respond to state standards while seeking to produce higher achievement among students. Many studies have examined the impact of departmentalization on student achievement with numerous opinions on the issue. The literature, however, is dated and lacks empirical evidence. As very little research explores departmentalization at the elementary level, this case study explored how departmentalization impacted staff, students, and academic achievement at an urban elementary school in Mississippi. The data collection included interviews with teachers, surveys from staff and students, observations of classrooms and planning sessions, and analysis of Mississippi Curriculum Test, II (MCT2) data. The findings of this case study revealed students were exposed to multiple teaching strategies from teachers who were able to use their planning time to create learning activities and assessments for fewer subjects. As departmentalization enhanced the fifth grade teachers’ accountability for the students’ academic and behavior performances, the teachers felt pressured into adjusting their lessons to the 90 minutes block schedule.

Grit, or the ability to persevere toward a long-term goal despite adversity, has been linked to academic success. Grit may also potentially buffer against the negative effects of depressive symptoms in an academic domain. The current study explores the relationship between depression, grit, and GPA, while also accounting for defensive responding, which has been proposed as a confound of grit but not empirically assessed in this context. We examined how social desirability affects the relationship between grit and GPA and hypothesized that social desirability would moderate the effect of grit between depressive symptoms and GPA. We found support for all hypothesized direct relationships. However, the interaction between depression, grit, social desirability, and GPA was non-significant. Results suggested modest construct validity of grit with it predicting GPA at low levels of social desirability but demonstrated no buffering effect against depression on GPA, highlighting the complexity of the relationship between these variables.

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of peer tutoring on the achievement of freshmen student in remedial mathematics, reading and writing from one community college and one university. The total population for this study is 300 freshmen, 150 freshmen from the community college and 150 freshmen from the university, composition of male (N=42%) and female (N=58%). The instructors will allow the researcher to pre-test selected students on the second day of class (Fall 2006) using the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (Form E) for reading, Algebra Skills Test (Test I) for math, and pre-determined writing assignments for writing. After four weeks of peer-tutoring (quasi-experimental group), the researcher will retest the students (post-test) and collect the test score from the posttest and analyze the data to determine the impact of peer tutoring on freshmen student in remedial mathematics, reading and writing. There were two hypothesis tested. The hypothesis revealed that there was no significant difference of t-test results for pretest scores in terms of Reading for Comprehensive and Vocabulary, Math, and English. It indicated that participants grouped by gender had no pretest threat in both the treatment and the control groups. Although the present study offers additional positive results to those studies conducted in the past, it is the recommendation of the researcher that additional studies needs to be undertaken.

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