The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international comparative study that assesses how well 15-year-olds, who have nearly completed compulsory schooling in most participating educational systems, can use their knowledge and skills to meet real-world opportunities and challenges. In each cycle of PISA, students are…

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funds programs providing services designed to assist children with a range of delays and disabilities in achieving individualized developmental and functional goals. There are two types of programs. Part C Early Intervention is for children ages birth-2, and Part B Preschool is for children…

In a global economy, stakeholders need to keep themselves well-informed in terms of how their local schools perform when compared with schools across the country and around the world. In doing so, they will be able to consider how well their schools are doing in a larger context and identify strengths as well as areas to target for improvement.…

How well are Wake County Public Schools (WCPSS) students prepared for problem-solving, scientific reasoning, and critical thinking? (1) WCPSS schools out-performed both the U.S., national, and international averages in each core subject of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA): mathematics, reading, and science; and (2) overall,…

The aim of this paper is to address two research questions related to the policy goal of having all children ready to learn at kindergarten entry. First, to what extent are children's socioemotional skills and behavior higher when they experience higher quality preschools? Second, are the effects of preschool center quality on these school…

In 1986 the United States (U.S.)-Japan Seminar on Mathematical Problem Solving convened to compare the state of problem solving in the classroom and in research in the two countries. The data and results given in this paper are the results of research conducted in the United States in response to the 1986 seminar. The U.S. and Japanese research…

Distinguishes the values of quantitative increments and qualitative shifts with regard to problem solving. Subjects were 136 children ranging from 6 through 8 years and were presented with the standard 3-disc problem to resolve in 3 minutes. Results indicated that qualitative shifts in children's representation of problem space are a crucial…

Presents a conceptual framework for analyzing students' mathematical understanding, reasoning, problem solving, and communication. Analyses of student responses indicated that the tasks appear to measure the complex thinking and reasoning processes that they were designed to assess. Concludes that the QUASAR assessment tasks can capture changes in…

This study investigated gender differences in kindergarteners' literacy skills, specifically, whether differences in children's classroom behaviors explained females' early learning advantage. Data included information on 16,883 kindergartners (8,701 boys and 8,182 girls) from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort of…

In the 1992 mathematics assessment of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), approximately one-third of the questions and about half of the student response time were devoted to questions asking students to construct their own responses. Regular constructed response items required a short answer with a problem solution, while…

This report documents the process undertaken to produce scales in three cognitive domains: knowing, applying, and reasoning. Included are the final scales showing differences among countries, as well as within countries. TIMSS 2003 is the third and most recently completed round of IEA's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, a very…