Prior research substantially overstates the cost of retention under test-based promotion policies to both taxpayers and students who delay labor market entry because it omits two important factors. First, there is a delay between the intervention and the taxpayer's expenditure. Second, on average, the treatment leads to less than a full year of…

In this article, I analyze episodes from two third-grade classrooms drawn from a larger classroom teaching experiment to explore how these students began to incorporate nonnumerical symbols in their mathematical expressions when asked to represent indeterminate quantities. The article addresses two research questions: What understandings did these…

This article presents a case study that examines the level of integration of mathematical knowledge in physics problem solving among first grade students of upper secondary school. We explore the ways in which two specific students utilize their knowledge and we attempt to identify the epistemological framings they refer to while solving a physics…

One crucial issue in mathematics development is how children come to spontaneously apply arithmetical principles (e.g. commutativity). According to expertise research, well-integrated conceptual and procedural knowledge is required. Here, we report a method composed of two independent tasks that assessed in an unobtrusive manner the spontaneous…

We use a natural experiment to show that the presence of an external examiner has both a direct and an indirect negative effect on the performance of monitored classes in standardized educational tests. The direct effect is the difference in the test performance between classes of the same school with and without external examiners. The indirect…

This classroom scholarship report is based on the teaching experience using Davydov's mathematics curriculum, which was developed in the former Soviet Union. While "from arithmetic to algebra" is the normally accepted instructional sequence in school mathematics, Davydov's curriculum is laid out "from algebra to arithmetic," focusing on algebraic…