In spring 2016, a course at Ohio State University (OSU) was introduced to teach advanced agronomic concepts and included the option to prepare students for the Certified Crop Adviser (CCA) exams offered by the American Society of Agronomy. From 2019 to 2021, revisions in instructional methods were implemented that introduced the use of pretests…

This study explores the effectiveness of integrating morphological instruction within comprehension strategy instruction. Participants were 203 students (N = 117 fifth-grade; 86 sixth-grade) from four urban schools who were randomly assigned to the intervention (N = 110; morphological problem-solving within comprehension strategy instruction) or…

Planning effective instruction for a classroom full of learners demands that the educator know what works and more importantly what works better for the group of people residing in the educator's classroom today. This action research study tested the efficacy of using the full compliment of assessments included in the curriculum adoption at the…

Pre-tests are a non-graded assessment tool used to determine pre-existing subject knowledge. Typically pre-tests are administered prior to a course to determine knowledge baseline, but here they are used to test students prior to topical material coverage throughout the course. While counterintuitive, the pre-tests cover material the student is…

A computer simulation procedure was developed to reproduce the overall pattern of results obtained in the Educational Testing Service Growth Study. Then simulated data for seven sets of 10,000 to 15,000 cases were analyzed, and findings compared on the basis of correlations between estimated and true growth scores. Findings showed that growth was…

Two methods of reading instruction (homogeneous grouping and graded classes) are compared for 165 students in 8 rural North Dakota schools by raw gain scores, residual gain scores, and the analysis of covariance. (CK)