A first-year teacher thrust mid-term into a mixed-grade geometry class in a tough high school struggles to sort out what works and does not work to engage the 120 students in meaningful learning. The students are largely from low-income urban families and demonstrate a broad range of abilities and motivation. The purpose of this study is to…

My dissertation investigates the effects of education policy on academic achievement. I focus on state and federal policies that seek to influence how teachers and school administrators educate their students, and I evaluate those policies' effects on academic achievement. Chapter 1 examines the effects of a compositional shift in a school's…

The Inviting School Survey-Revised (ISS-R) was adapted and translated into Traditional Chinese (ISS-RC), using a five-step process, based on international test administration guidelines, involving judgmental, logical, and empirical methods. Both versions were administered to a convenience sample of Chinese-English fluent Hong Kong school community…

Recent developments in the field of genomics will impact the daily practice of biology teachers who teach genetics in secondary education. This study reports on the first results of a research project aimed at enhancing biology teacher knowledge for teaching genetics in the context of genetic testing. The increasing body of scientific knowledge…

Researchers often compare the relationship between an outcome and covariate for two or more groups by evaluating whether the fitted regression curves differ significantly. When they do, researchers need to determine the "significance region," or the values of the covariate where the curves significantly differ. In analysis of covariance (ANCOVA),…

Increasing public understanding of school testing programs is seen as the joint responsibility of test publishers and schools, and also as a primary responsibility on the part of test publishers to increase the schools' understanding of tests. The most common areas of misunderstanding about tests are addressed: purpose of the testing program; the…

Time spent in contact with academic course materials as a function of two testing schedules was measured using college undergraduates in an introductory Educational Psychology course. A multi-manipulation single organism design was employed with all subjects enabling both individual and group analysis. A study room equipped with an adjacent…

The results of a school district's move to proficiency testing in mathematics are described and discussed. (MK)

The Canter-BIP (Background Interfence Procedure) represents an instrument free of many effects found to add to error variance in the application of other instruments. It is essentially free of sex, intelligence level, emotional status and maturational effects, and, at least for young children, is essentially free of ethnic group effects. (Author)

The purpose of the present experiment was to test whether a combination of audio and transparency projection, transparency projection, or the standard paper and pencil method of testing is superior when testing college students on a multiple-choice achievement test in basic psychology. (Author)

The authors discuss the advisability of making orientation test batteries voluntary. Though students are opposed to compulsory testing, the authors argue that the information gained from them is important to the educational process. (CG)

The author suggests several modifications in the rationale of criterion-referenced measurement in order to increase the utility and meaningfulness of test results for teachers. (AA)

A testing effect occurs when a learner performs better on a retention test after studying the material and taking a practice-retention test than after studying the material twice. In the present study, 282 participants watched a narrated animation about lightning formation and then watched the presentation again (restudy), took a…

Three experiments identified factors that did and did not enhance the formation of two-node four-member equivalence classes when training and testing were conducted with trials presented in a trace stimulus pairing two-response (SP2R) format. All trials contained two separately presented stimuli. Half of the trials, called within-class trials,…

Academic writing and education in foreign and second languages both have lengthy histories. Their histories have diverged but also intersected. Matsuda (2005), for example, described the convergence in policies that led to a distinctive discipline of "L2 writing" in higher education in the U.S.A. during the latter part of the 20th century.…