To help low achievers improve their grades and their self-concept, a middle school teacher adapted traditional testing procedures to students' learning styles; he then grouped them by achievement level and participation in the alternative assessment program. Participants had higher test grades, fewer classroom behavior problems, increased…

A set of functional-analytic materials, entailing the study and practice of sociostylistic variation, was implemented in three eighth-grade French immersion (FI) classrooms by their respective teachers during French language arts classes over a five-week period. Pre- and posttests indicate that functional-analytic teaching improved FI students'…

A college teacher and student describe the rationale behind collaborative test taking and their efforts to implement it in a freshman English course. The approach, in which students learn to work collaboratively from the beginning of the course, allows participants to solve problems related to a writing task and teaches real-world work skills.…

This article describes the Developmental Indicators for the Assessment of Learning-Third Edition, a global screener designed to be administered to children ages 3 through 6.11 years. The instrument assesses motor skills, conceptual knowledge, language skills, self-help skills, and social behaviors. Its administration, standardization, reliability,…

A study of senior education majors in the United Kingdom investigated the realism of student expectations of a required independent research project. Student self-assessments and teacher assessments showed little correlation, and students' evaluation criteria emphasized lower-order skills (style and presentation) and ignored higher-order processes…

Elementary school students (n=11) were pretested and then given daily formal instruction for 2 weeks in use of past tense and plural noun forms and then posttested. A significant difference was found between these students and control group in detection and correction of noun plural forms, but not in similar test of past tense forms. (49…

A study examined general education student assessment efforts at 130 colleges and universities. Based on self-study reports and on-site evaluation reports of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools during the accreditation process, the study looked at implementation, explicit objectives, and use of quantitative and qualitative…

Examined the foreign-language-learning abilities of 14- to 15-year olds in Britain, Germany, and Greece. Comparison of results from tests of students' foreign vocabulary knowledge indicated that British students had only one-third to one-half of the foreign language vocabulary knowledge of Greek and German students. They also spent less time…

Influenced by worldwide globalization forces new structures of control have emerged in Mexico at the school level, and career ladders reward teachers' compliance with testing and training schemes; nevertheless the long-standing institutions of initial teacher education continue to show a strong resistance to change. Increased accountability is…

This study evaluates the effects of employing the linear, normalizing, and arcsine transformation methods for constructing scale scores on the Basic Competence Test (BCTEST). Tests in three subject areas (Chinese, English, and Mathematics) were studied using the data of test administrations from 2001 to 2003. The resulting scale scores for each…

Over the last fifteen years, many states have implemented high-stakes tests as part of an effort to strengthen accountability for schools, teachers, and students. Predictably, there has been vigorous disagreement regarding the contributions of such policies to increasing test scores and, more importantly, to improving student learning. A recent…

Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), every school is subject to the controversial mandates for annual test score gains contained in the federal law. The law represents a profound change in the relationship between the federal government and state and local education agencies regarding who controls education and has direct implications for…

In this article, the authors describe a collaborative effort involving 30 school districts in California's Silicon Valley that are seeking to overcome the ill effects of mandatory high-stakes standardized testing in mathematics. These districts administer, score, and analyze a common set of performance assessments in mathematics in a way that…

States' policy approaches to accountability tend to divide between a primary emphasis on input guarantees and a primary emphasis on performance guarantees. In the midst of keen controversies about the impact of high-stakes testing under the No Child Left Behind Act, this article examines separate and joint effects of input-guarantee versus…

This study investigated the accuracy order of English relative clauses in the usage of 199 Japanese high school students of English as a foreign language (EFL). Specifically, it looked at: (1) whether the Accessibility Hierarchy conform to the accuracy order by Japanese senior high school students of EFL; and (2) how frequently this population…