The study Standardized Economics Achievement Test for senior secondary school students in Nigeria. Three research questions guided the study. The standardized test in Economics was first constructed by an expert as a valid and reliable instrument. The test was then used for standardization in this study. That is, ensuring that the Economics…

This article engages with recent policy on reading comprehension. It argues that the construct of inference has been treated as a single entity despite research and literature to the contrary, and this is perpetuated in the National Curriculum for 2014. It explores the limitations of conceptualising inference as a unitary construct and…

Currently, too few people have too much influence over those who control the education research purse strings. And, those who control the purse strings have too much influence over policy decisions. Until folk at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the US Education Department--to mention just a couple of consistent funders of education…

More than 1 million students in nearly 16,000 schools participated in the spring 2014 Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) field test. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia administered the test. The primary purposes of the PARCC field test were to: (1) Examine the quality of test questions and tasks; (2)…

Concerns have been raised about the impact Australia's national standardised testing, the National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), has upon the well-being of students, parents and teachers. To date, research evidence is unclear as to the level and extent of emotional distress experienced by stakeholders during testing. Despite…

Background: Although various studies on general language performance have investigated determinants of students' reading comprehension (e.g., reading amount), they have paid insufficient attention to how students perceive parental values influence their language-related values and behaviour--and, as a consequence, their performance. This is…

This study analyses the relationships among educational performance, field dependence-independence cognitive style and factors traditionally associated with performance and style, to build a comprehensive model of factors associated with the levels of education performance of students in Bogotá. A total of 3003 students, of grades 8 and 10, from…

Bui, Craig, and Imberman assessed the impact of gifted and talented programs on student achievement using regression discontinuity and random assignment to gifted magnet schools. In both analyses, they found minimal impact of the gifted and talented programs on student achievement. This commentary addresses two concerns associated with the study.…

A short training program for evaluating responses to an essay writing task consisted of scoring 20 training essays with immediate feedback about the correct score. The same scoring session also served as a certification test for trainees. Participants with little or no previous rating experience completed this session and 14 trainees who passed an…

School administrators across the nation are actively searching for solutions to increase student achievement due in part to the significant amount of knowledge that is lost annually each summer. Mathematical computation skills are especially at-risk. This quantitative research study was designed to investigate the impact of summer recess also…

We estimate the effects of relative age in kindergarten using data from an experiment where children of the same age were randomly assigned to different kindergarten classmates. We exploit the resulting experimental variation in relative age in conjunction with variation in expected kindergarten entry age based on birth date to account for…

Over the past few years, students by the thousands have refused to take their state's standardized tests. This "opt-out" phenomenon has prompted debate in state legislatures and in Washington, putting states at risk of losing Title I funds. Advocates describe opt-out as a grassroots movement of parents concerned about overtesting,…

Chinese higher education is experiencing rapid development and growth. With tremendous resources invested in higher education, policy makers have requested more direct evidence of student learning. However, assessment tools that can be used to measure college-level learning are scarce in China. To mitigate this situation, we translated the…

The prevalence of homeschooling in the United States is increasing. Yet little is known about how commonly used predictors of postsecondary academic performance (SAT, high school grade point average [HSGPA]) perform for homeschooled students. Postsecondary performance at 140 colleges and universities was analyzed comparing a sample of traditional…

A substantial proportion of participants in public adult education programs struggle with "basic" academic print literacy skills. According to the 2014-2015 National Reporting System (NRS) data, 48.7% of the national adult basic education/adult secondary education (ABE/ ASE) population tested as reading at or below the "Low…