This study examined the effect of oral administration accommodations on test structure and student performance on the mathematics portion of the South Carolina High School Exit Examination (HSEE). The examination was given at Grade 10 and was untimed. Three groups of students were studied. Two groups took the regular form. One group had recorded…

Educational tests used for accountability purposes must represent the content domains they purport to measure. When such tests are used to monitor progress over time, the consistency of the test content across years is important for ensuring that observed changes in test scores are due to student achievement rather than to changes in what the test…

This research examined changes in intrinsic and extrinsic motivation during the transition from junior to senior high school as well as the impact of motivational changes on various educational consequences (i.e., dropout intentions, absenteeism, homework frequency, and educational aspirations). A total of 646 participants completed a…

In this paper, we describe the skeleton of two teaching units, based on a Model for teaching mathematics, Context Orientated Teaching (COT). The first teaching unit concerns the proof of a mathematical proposition, while the second one concerns the solution of an open problem. Both are taught in the 10th grade, under the specific conditions of the…

This study examined the relationship of overt and relational victimization to social anxiety, loneliness, and prosocial behaviours in a sample of female adolescents. The Social Experience Questionnaire, Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents, and Asher Loneliness Scale were administered to 561 girls in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh grades of an…

The results of a large scale (N=1001) cross-sectional (Years 6, 8 and 10) study of students' ideas about the composition of unpolluted air, the nature of air pollution, the biological consequences of air pollution, and about acid rain and the Greenhouse Effect are reported. A range of persistent alternative conceptions were identified, in some…

The ability to critically evaluate whether information presented actually supports a given claim is essential for cognitive and social development. This paper presents a study focusing on developmental and contextual aspects of this ability (called antilogos). We tested antilogos for different variables: age group (Grades 8 and 10), direction of…

This study surveyed 166 students when they were in Grade 8 of high school and then again when they were in Grade 10, using measures of career indecision and career decision-making self-efficacy. Consistent with social-cognitive theories, the authors hypothesized that changes in self-efficacy over time would be causally associated with changes in…

This article links student and family characteristics, along with perceived purposes for doing homework, to homework emotion management as reported by 205 high school students in grades 9-10. The results revealed that adolescents' management of their emotions was not related to grade level and amount of parental education. However, girls and…

This general achievement trends profile includes information that the Center on Education Policy (CEP) and the Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO) obtained from states from fall 2008 through April 2009. Included herein are: (1) Bullet points summarizing key findings about achievement trends in that state at three performance…

Recently, the significance of learners' informal reasoning on socio-scientific issues has received increasing attention among science educators. To gain deeper insights into this important issue, an integrated analytic framework was developed in this study. With this framework, 71 Grade 10 students' informal reasoning about nuclear energy usage…

The purpose of the study was to demonstrate that two schools which were geographically separated could be digitally included using broadband radio connections, interactive white-boards and other technologies to enable virtual interactive and collaborative lessons. The project was established to overcome a transport problem of bussing learners from…

The current study examined the fit of a 2 x 2 achievement goal model among a diverse sample of nearly 700 10th-grade students, distinguishing between both mastery and performance goals and approach and avoidance orientations. Additionally, relationships between achievement goals and GPA and intrinsic value of school were examined, and adolescents'…

In this article, the author examines her racial identity and its impact on her interpretation of the schooling experiences of a 10th grade Latina in an ethnographic case study. Prior to this study, the author had been working in a university-based family literacy program where she met Zulmy's mother, Manuela. Due to her experience as a middle…

Data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 are used to link students with particular teachers and classes to estimate the impact of observable and unobservable schooling characteristics on student outcomes. A variety of models show some schooling resources, particularly teacher qualifications, to be significant in influencing…