Examining a popular political notion, this article presents results from a series of Spearman Rho calculations conducted to investigate relationships between countries' rankings on international tests of mathematics and science and future economic competitiveness as measured by the 2006 World Economic Forum's Growth Competitiveness Index (GCI).…

This study examined the effects of task difficulty on on-task behavior for four students exhibiting low levels of math performance and on-task behavior. Curriculum-based assessments were conducted with each student to define the difficulty level of math tasks for each student based on the individual's rate of accurate performance on computational…

This project investigated the impacts of family religious involvement and family religious affiliations on parenting practices and academic performance. This study utilized data from the base-year and first follow-up of the Education Longitudinal Study: 2002/2004 (ELS). A series of statistical techniques were incorporated to examine the nature of…

Success in school is a vital developmental outcome for children. In recent decades, it has been shown that school outcomes are influenced by a variety of environments and social processes in the lives of children, both within and across the central microsystems of family, school, and neighborhood. The current study used a multilevel analytic…

Akiba, LeTendre, and Scribner (2007) identified two problems with mathematics education in the United States: (a) a shortage of qualified mathematics teachers and (b) unequal access to those teachers by students of high and low socioeconomic status. Akiba et al. called for further research on how South Korea and other countries have achieved…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore how teacher leaders help teachers improve mathematics and science teaching. Design/methodology/approach: Research focused on a purposive sample of seven teacher leaders selected to vary in their time allocated to teacher leader work and their content knowledge. Each teacher leader was interviewed, as were two…

Earlier reports have shown that prospective teachers' conceptions about teaching science to a high degree are resistant and do not change substantially during the teacher-training programme. In our investigation we elucidate the prospective teachers' initial conceptions about pupils' understanding of science and mathematics. We applied "The…

Within the context of a mathematics reform effort to implement algebra in elementary schools, there is a pressure to provide results in the form of student achievement scores. However, widely-used measures of student achievement may be unrelated to the ideas and instructional practices encouraged by the reform effort. The inappropriate use of…

This study examined the effects of teaching a test-taking strategy to 4 fourth- and fifth-grade students with mild mental disabilities on reading and math achievement. The intervention consisted of a direct and explicit instructional method using a mnemonic strategy. The participants' acquisition and application of the test-taking strategy on…

In this study, the authors examined the effects of two supplemental interventions on the mathematics achievement of low-performing intermediate-grade students. A conceptually based intervention designed to reteach fundamental mathematics was evaluated along with an intervention designed to provide extended time in the context of the core…

The paper approaches the issue of school choice in an indirect manner by investigating the effectiveness of public, private government-dependent and private independent schools in 19 Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development countries selected from the PISA 2000 survey for this purpose. In a multilevel approach we estimate these…

This article provides insight into how teachers can listen to students' stories about themselves and mathematics to understand the characteristics that students attribute to themselves. The article also explains how to use stories to inspire and motivate children in mathematics. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

In most countries, girls perform better than boys in reading but worse in mathematics. However, there is much variation between countries. Explanations for the gender gaps include the organisation of the school system, students' expectations and macro-societal factors. The purpose of this paper is to account for gender differences in both reading…

This pilot study proposes a set of analytical steps for comparing schools that participate in the National Science Foundation's Math and Science Partnership (MSP) Program and their nonparticipating peers in the same state. This pilot is part of a larger effort to evaluate the MSP Program's role in student achievement, with two companion analyses.…

This study describes the Math and Science Partnership Program Evaluation (MSP-PE) during the project's first two years and provides the evaluation framework being used to assess the National Science Foundation's MSP Program. The study conveys the MSP-PE's ongoing design and implementation. To show how they reflect the nature of the MSP Program,…