The Oregon Statewide Report Card is an annual publication required by law (ORS 329.115), which reports on the state of public schools and their progress towards the goals of the Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century. The purpose of the Oregon Report Card is to monitor trends among school districts and Oregon's progress toward achieving the…

This document presents the proceedings of the 20th Annual Research Forum held June 25, 2015, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following 21 action research papers: (1) History Lives! The Use of Simulations in a High School Social Studies Classroom (Lydia Adkins); (2) Using Francophone Music in the High…

Using PISA 2000 data, this article examines cross-national variation in rural mathematics achievement among 15-year-olds in 24 industrialized nations. Rural mathematics scores were significantly lower than scores in urban and medium-size communities in 14 of 24 countries. However, patterns were complex. Most commonly, a linear relationship…

The stories of four mathematically successful middle schools African American boys are used to describe the roles, perceptions, and experiences of their parents. The parents of played multiple roles for their sons: (a) guardians of opportunities, (b) standard setters, (c) resources for mathematical knowledge, and (d) models of success. As…

Many researchers and the International Test Commission's (Hambleton, 2005) caution against treating scores from different language versions of a test as equivalent, without conducting empirical research to verify such equivalence. In this study, we evaluated the equivalence of English and Malay versions of a 9th-grade math test administered in…

The Idaho Math Initiative has been developed to help raise student achievement in mathematics across all K-12 grades, focusing on three main areas: teacher education, student achievement, and public awareness. This report describes the initial phase of the Math Initiative, including: (1) Assessment; (2) Intervention; (3) Standards; (4) Curriculum;…

The study investigated the effects of mathematics anxiety on matriculation students as related to motivation and achievement. Subjects included 88 students who were at the end of their second semester of study. Anxiety and motivation were measured using the Fennema-Sherman Math Anxiety Scale (MAS) and Effectance Motivation Scale (EMS)…

This article reports results derived from the national study of Grade 5 in Vietnamese primary schools in which teachers and pupils took tests in reading and mathematics. The test data were calibrated so that teacher and pupil results could be mapped onto the same continuum. Results showed that the overlapping tests for teachers and pupils were…

Social capital theory, recent developments in the theory of identity and a small econometric literature all suggest positive attainment effects from faith schooling. To test this hypothesis, the authors use a unique data set on Flemish secondary school students from the 1999 repeat of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study to…

Teacher educators, administrators, policy-makers, and novice and advanced teacher candidates can achieve educational success and advance high-quality teacher preparation programmes. To do this, they must identify and cultivate positive dispositions for professional competence, commitment, and success in teaching children and adolescents.…

The authors investigated the effects of student spatial ability, as measured by Raven's Progressive Colored Matrices (J. C. Raven, 1938) and type of instructional program on geometry achievement. Sixth-grade students worked through either 6 instructional activities in Geometer's Sketchpad (Key Curriculum Press, 1993), a dynamic geometry program,…

The purpose of this study was to explore gender differences in mathematics achievement as demonstrated by performance on the mathematics subsection of a nationwide high school entrance examination in Turkey. In this study, the cities in Turkey were separated into five groups according to their level of economic development. The analysis was based…

This study illustrates how a diagnostic testing model can be used to make detailed comparisons between student populations participating in international assessments. The performance of Turkish students on the TIMSS-R mathematics test was reanalyzed with a diagnostic testing model called the Rule Space Model. First, mathematical and cognitive…

The aim of the National Numeracy Strategy is to raise standards in numeracy. Strong evidence for its success has, however, been lacking: most of the available data come from performance on National Test assessments administered in schools or from Ofsted reports, and is vulnerable to suggestions of bias. An opportunistic analysis of data from a…

The authors investigated the relatively short-term and longer term effects of grade retention in 1st grade on the growth of mathematics and reading achievement over 4 years. The authors initially identified a large multiethnic sample (n = 784) of children who were below the median in literacy at school entrance. From this sample, the authors…