Data from a statewide survey, conducted by the Indiana Prevention Resource Center, of 20,629 Indiana students in grades 5-12 were analyzed to determine the extent to which cigarette smoking predicted use of alcohol and other drugs and acted as a so-called "gateway drug." A three-stage purposive/quota cluster sampling strategy yielded a representative sample of Indiana students, stratified by grade. Cross-tabulated data revealed a strong, dose-dependent relationship between smoking behavior and binge drinking, as well as use of alcohol and illicit drugs. Daily pack-a-day smokers were three times more likely to drink alcohol, seven times more likely to use smokeless tobacco, and 10-30 times more likely to use illicit drugs than nonsmokers. A stepwise multiple regression analyzed the role that the student's perceptions of the risk of using drugs and of peer approval/disapproval of the student's drug use, gender, grade in school, and ethnic background played in predicting alcohol and other drug use.

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Middle-class mothers typically are viewed as ideal models in terms of their values and goals related to education, participation in their children’s education, and professional involvement in schooling. Yet, the results of this study indicate that educated, middle-class mothers, perceived as liberals who believe in integrated and inclusive education, still support segregated and stratified school structures that mainly benefit students of the middle class. Thompson’s (1990) modes of operation of ideology and strategies of symbolic construction shed light on the ways ideology works to establish and sustain high-income parents’ self-interested educational choices while, at the same time, allowing them to maintain a liberal image. The study illustrates how ideology allows parents to bridge disparate streams of thought and salve the dissonance that results from the contradiction between their desired liberal identity and class positionality.

Advocates of progressive education have been frustrated by the lack of success in implementing and sustaining progressive school reform. T he ideals of progressive education are associated with educated professionals and middle-class parents ± especially mothers ± are in¯uential in determining the nature of education for their children and, inadvertently, for all children. T his study examines the attitudes towards schooling of middle-class, college-educated mothers in order to discern their curricular and pedagogical preferences. T he ® ndings indicate that an impediment to progressive reform is the lack of support for progressive forms of schooling among its supposed proponents, the college-educated members of the middle class. On one level middle-class parents espouse the liberal notions of open, integrated, multicultural, student-centred education that are typically associated with parents of this class. T heir narratives, however, reveal an actual preference for conservative practice ± for factual, tightly-sequenced, subject-area-bound, Western-civilization-oriented curricula ± in which children of their class have traditionally established measurable competencies and uncontested superiority. ), and numerous articles on the in¯uence of social class on schooling, and on sexuality issues of people with cognitive disabilities. Massoumeh Majd-Jabbari received her doctorate in educational inquiry and methodology from Indiana University. Her specializations are drug-abuse prevention, attitude measurement and scale construction. 0022± 0272/98 $12´00 Ñ 1998 T aylor & Francis Ltd 432e. brantlinger and m. majd-jabbari 438 e. brantlinger and m. majd-jabbari * Welfare department; shelter for abused women; home daycare; group home for adults with mental disabilities.

This investigation examined prospective and experienced teachers' perceptions of relatedness among abilities. Participants included 111 undergraduate education students without teaching experience and 79 graduate students who were experienced teachers. Students were required to indicate the resemblance among 20 different kinds of abilities, using sorting, similarity ratings, and/or trait ratings. These data were analyzed using clustering, multidimensional scaling, and factor analysis approaches. Both prospective and experienced teachers tended to agree on five categories of giftedness: analytic or cognitive ability, personality and social Skills, creative arts, motor skitts, and verbal ability. Although the findings resemble Gardner's (1983) "multiple intelligences" and suggest that teachers hold appropriate beliefs about relationships among abilities, further investigations are required to explore the extent to which their conceptions relate to their day-to-day interactions, judgments, and decisions in their classrooms Categories of Giftedness Perceived by TeachersDespite renewed interest in educational programming for gifted and talented students, most of these pupils are taught primarily by teachers who lack special training in the area. Under these conditions, it is important to understand how teachers perceive giftedness and talent. Much research has shown that when teachers perceive a student to be generally able, there are important consequences for teaching and learning. (Good and Brophy, 1984). We know less about the extent to which teachers overgeneralize or are realistic in their recognition of the relationships among different abilities. Do they perceive students who are gifted in one area to be also talented in most other areas, or do they see abilities as unique to highly specific and nonoverlapping areas? Do they think students who are excellent in mathematics are unlikely to be any good in the arts?The answers to such questions would appear to be of more than academic interest. If teachers overgeneralize from their observation of a student's apparent ability in one area to other areas, the consequence is likely to be inappropriate teaching and leaming. Gardner (1985) has pointed out the widespread tendency in our culture to conceive of abilities as highly interrelated and to encompass this generalized ability under the notion of intelligence and the measure of IQ. His work is devoted to demonstrating the existence of several relatively independent &dquo;intelligences&dquo; in order to break down this bias toward a unitary concept of intelligence. It seems likely that teachers may also have this bias. The consequences of such a bias among teachers may be much more serious than the misconceptions of the average person because of its potential influence on instruction and referral for special programming for gifted students.Although the question of whether intelligence should be viewed as unitary or as multiple abilities has been the subject of extensive investigation and theorizing (e.g., Gardner, ...