Using clickers to gauge student understanding in large classrooms is well documented. Less well known is the effectiveness of using clickers with youth for test taking in large-scale Extension programs. This article describes the benefits and challenges of collecting evaluation data using clickers with a third-grade population participating in a…

The White House will soon unveil a final version of its "college scorecard"--an online tool giving college-bound students and their families a hype-free snapshot of reliable information about any U.S. campus: real costs, graduation rates, student debt statistics, and earning potential of graduates. The college scorecard is a good idea…

With increased accountability attached to students' results on national testing in Australia, teachers feel under pressure to prepare students for the tests. However, this can lead to shallow teaching of a narrowed curriculum. An alternative approach involves using data to identify common errors and misconceptions, discussing strategies aimed at…

Using data from the National Center for Educational Statistics research spanning fifteen years, researchers examined the impact of national educational policy implementation on the role of social studies in elementary schools. Specifically, with the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2007 and the continuation of federal-mandated…

When 2 targets are embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation stream of distractors, perception of the second target is impaired when the intertarget lag is relatively short (less than 500 ms). Stimuli concurrently presented with the stream can affect this phenomenon, which is called attentional blink (AB). Previous studies have yielded…

The author's school is a founding member of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools, which includes all sorts of institutions--some in highly affluent communities, others with vastly more socioeconomically diverse populations, and some with strong percentages of international students. Individual members' approaches to…

In this study, we investigate the logistic regression (LR), Mantel-Haenszel (MH), and Breslow-Day (BD) procedures for the simultaneous detection of both uniform and nonuniform differential item functioning (DIF). A simulation study was used to assess and compare the Type I error rate and power of a combined decision rule (CDR), which assesses DIF…

This study explored how science teachers and school administrators perceive the use of the affective domain during science instruction situated within a high-stakes testing environment. Through a multimethodological inquiry using phenomenology and critical ethnography, the researcher conducted semi-structured interviews with six fifth-grade…

This article is based upon a presentation given at the Language Testing Research Colloquium (LTRC) held in Denver, Colorado, in March 2009. That presentation reviewed some of the recent attempts from within our research community to "tell the story" of our field over several decades. It explored how the discourse of these narratives contributes to…

This article reviews the "Developmental Reading Assessment--Second Edition" (DRA2), a teacher-administered assessment that identifies students' instructional level, along with their strengths and weaknesses in reading. Once teachers calculate and interpret scores, the data can purportedly be used to inform, and possibly individualize,…

Performance at the Defense Language Institute was examined through the prism of human performance technology and the strategic impact model. This examination revealed performance deficiencies in the administrative realm that required mainly a noninstructional intervention. A systematic analysis showed that digitizing administrative procedures…

Concept inventories are often used to assess current student understanding although conceptual change models are problematic. Due to controversies with conceptual change models and the realities of student assessment, it is important that concept inventories are evaluated using a variety of theoretical models to improve quality. This study used a…

This article discusses CALL development from both educational and ergonomic perspectives. It focuses on the learner-task-tool interaction, in particular on the aspects contributing to its overall quality, herein called "usability." Two pilot studies are described that were carried out with intermediate to advanced learners of French in two…

Bullying, a prevalent form of school violence, threatens development and learning. This article reports the findings of a qualitative study conducted in an elementary school, designed to gain an ecological understanding of bullying perceptions of this school community. The three research questions were: (a) How do individuals and groups within…

There has been a recent upsurge of interest in exploring how choices of methods and timing of instruction affect the rate and persistence of learning. The authors review three lines of experimentation--all conducted using educationally relevant materials and time intervals--that call into question important aspects of common instructional…