High-stakes, standardized testing plays an important role in the lives of many students as they apply to college and compete for scholarships. In states where college readiness measures, like the ACT® test, are used for school and district accountability, the ACT scores of all students, whether college-bound or not, are a top priority for school…

Alternative teacher certification has emerged in the past two decades as one policy state leaders can leverage to recruit and prepare high-quality teachers to meet demands that are unique to their student populations. Indeed, in specific circumstances such as addressing teacher shortages, alternative teacher certification can be viewed as an…

Test preparation plays an important role in high-stakes standardized testing. While test preparation companies may claim large, at times unrealistic, gains associated with product use, much of which can be very costly, scientific research supports a more moderate impact of test preparation. ACT offers a number of test preparation opportunities for…

We developed a two-semester series of intensive (six-contact hours per week) behavioral research methods courses with an integrated statistics curriculum. Our approach includes the use of team-based learning, authentic projects, and Excel and SPSS. We assessed the effectiveness of our approach by examining our students' content area scores on the…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to track, compare, and analyze the college readiness of two cohorts of Hispanic English Language Learners (ELLs) by examining scores on state exit-level and national college entrance exams. One cohort was enrolled in the early-exit Transitional Bilingual Education (TBE) program, while the other cohort was…