Beginning with the No Child Left Behind federal legislation, states were required to use data to monitor and improve student achievement. For high schools, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education chose End of Course Exams (EOC) to demonstrate levels of student achievement. The policy changed from school choice of paper-pencil…

Assessing the comparability of different groups is an issue facing many researchers and evaluators in a variety of settings. Commonly, null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is incorrectly used to demonstrate comparability when a non-significant result is found. This is problematic because a failure to find a difference between groups is not…

A self-report assessment scale of school connectedness was validated in this study based on the data from middle-school children in a northeastern state of the United States (n = 145). The scale was based on the School Bonding Model (Morita, 1991), which was derived reductively from the social control (bond) theory (Hirschi, 1969). This validation…

Background: The current study updates and extends the original research synthesis of effective instructional strategies presented in "Classroom Instruction that Works" ("CITW"; Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001). That work identified nine instructional strategies for improving academic achievement and synthesized findings from previous…

Testing is a primary tool for measuring students' comprehension of course material in many collegiate business courses. Test anxiety experienced by students may adversely affect the ability of testing to measure students' comprehension of course material. In this study, the author specifically examined the relationships between test anxiety…

Reviews several teaching methodologies in terms of negative affect. Findings indicate that in those situations where students have little incentive to do well or admit that they wish to do poorly, increased negative affect can motivate them to function at a level of operational tension and achieve optimum learning and performance. (36 references)…

Two studies of the effects of "Sesame Street" are presented. In the first case, the study tested two hypotheses: (1) "Sesame Street" can prepare poverty children for first grade; and (2) "Sesame Street" can narrow the achievement gap between the poor and the middle-class child. Twenty-four pairs of poverty children…

The increased use of criterion-referenced statewide testing programs is an outgrowth of the need for more diagnostic information for planning and decision making than is provided by norm-referenced programs. There remains, however, a need for state agencies to compare the results of local districts to a variety of comparison groups for the purpose…