The current study examined if preschoolers' understanding of fantasy and reality are related to their learning from educational videos. Forty-nine 3- to 6-year-old children watched short clips of popular educational programs in which animated characters solved problems. Following video viewing, children attempted to solve real-world problems…

This Commentary examines where the creativity research has been and where it is going. They key points include evolving definitions of creativity, interdisciplinarity in the creativity research, divergent thinking as a reliable index of creative potential, improvements in testing, the impact of technology, the inclusion of political, moral, and…

We carried out 4 semester-long studies of student performance in a college research methods course (total N = 588). Two sections of it were taught each semester with systematic and controlled differences between them. Key manipulations were repeated (with some variation) across the 4 terms, allowing assessment of replicability of effects.…

This article argues that assessment is a central feature of teaching, particularly as a means to determine whether what has been taught has been learnt. However, I take issue with the current trend in education which places a significant amount of emphasis upon large-scale public testing, which in turn has exacerbated the…

Some schools use results from the MAP® Growth™ interim assessments from Northwest Evaluation Association® (NWEA®) in a number of high-stakes ways. These include as a component of their teacher evaluation systems, to determine whether a student advances to the next grade, or as an indicator for student readiness for certain programs or…

This study seeks to identify the reasons for the decline in science fair participation, ascertain educators' views on the value of science fair as a curriculum tool to teach state science standards and assess the importance and relevance of science fair in today's science curriculum. The Ohio Academy of Science (OAS) provided state data showing…

Concepts of second language proficiency and how proficiency may be assessed have changed considerably over the last 20 years. New notions of validity with respect to the interpretation and uses of test scores have begun to shape discussions about test validity and quality assurance in college world language departments, in government, and in…

This executive summary synthesizes recent research on formative assessment to elucidate its core components, then examines some new approaches currently being tried in schools. It considers the evidence for them, as well as the questions and issues they continue to raise, and takes a look at the challenges schools and school systems face in…

Assessment is often used to hold schools and teachers accountable for student learning. Assessment instruments are used as tools to guide curriculum choices and lesson plans, from districts to individual students. In any discipline, knowing what students know and what they have learned following a lesson is important on multiple levels. This is…

Educators, parents, and the public depend on accurate, valid, reliable, and timely information about student academic performance. Testing irregularities--breaches of test security or improper administration of academic testing--undermine efforts to use those data to improve student achievement. Unfortunately, there have been high-profile and…

As part of the Race to the Top initiative, the United States Department of Education made nearly 1 billion dollars available in State Educational Technology grants with the goal of ramping up school technology. One result of this effort is that states, districts, and schools across the country are using computerized assessments to measure their…

Though the testing-effect can be boosted by including a restudy phase after answering test questions, we do not know precisely why it does so. One possible explanation is being tested here. The present study measured attention allocation during initial reading and rereading with a remote eye tracker to gain information on the cognitive processes…

This paper provides an empirical account of commercial genetic testing in China. Commercial predictive genetic testing has emerged and is developing rapidly in China, but there is no strict and effective governance. This raises a number of serious social and ethical issues as a consequence of the enormous potential market for such tests. The paper…

Knowledge of mechanisms is critical for causal reasoning. We contrasted two possible organizations of causal knowledge--an interconnected causal "network," where events are causally connected without any boundaries delineating discrete mechanisms; or a set of disparate mechanisms--causal "islands"--such that events in different…

Although retrieval often enhances subsequent memory (the testing effect), a negative testing effect has recently been documented in which prior retrieval harms later recall compared with restudying. The negative testing effect was predicated on the negative generation effect and the item-specific-relational framework. The present experiments…