A study was conducted at Merrimack College in Massachusetts to compare the grades of students who took the recommended course as determined by their mathematics placement exam score and those who did not follow this recommendation. The goal was to decide whether the mathematics placement exam used at Merrimack College was effective in placing…

This study reports on teachers' attitudes towards their students' speech varieties of English. A sample of 172 primary, district high and secondary teachers in Western Australian was surveyed on their attitudes towards language variation and towards their students' use of specific English variants. The teachers were found to have generally…

This Statistics in Brief analyzes parents' reports of school practices to provide information to families, using data from the 2003 Parent and Family Involvement in Education Survey and the 1996 Parent and Family Involvement in Education and Civic Involvement Survey of the National Household Education Surveys Program. Parent reports of school…

Using a mixed-methodology, longitudinal design, individual differences and contextual factors related to differential response to general education instruction were examined. We tested a response-to-instruction model reflecting the first three phases of a model proposed by Fuchs and Fuchs (1998). We classified first- and second-grade children…

To investigate the use, or otherwise, of conversational adjustments (CAs), in a normal instructional setting, the quality of speech generated during meaning negotiation, and learner perception of the task under study, a quantitative and a qualitative analysis was carried out of language produced in a dyadic set-up in a one-way information task, a…

With the continual progress of computer technologies, computer automated scoring (CAS) has become a popular tool for evaluating writing assessments. Research of applications of these methodologies to new types of performance assessments is still emerging. While research has generally shown a high agreement of CAS system generated scores with those…

Mathematical knowledge and understanding is important not only for scientific progress and development but also for its day-to-day application in social sciences and arts, government, business and management studies and household chores. But the general performance in school mathematics in Kenya has been poor over the years. There is evidence that…

Does psychological distress increase mortality risk? If it does, are women more vulnerable than men to the effect of distress on mortality? Drawing from cumulative disadvantage theory, these questions are addressed with data from a 20-year follow-up of a national sample of adults ages 25-74. Event history analyses were performed to examine…

In pursuit of quality, the learning process should be continuously improved by changing, among other things, the learning material and the way learning is facilitated. A concern for academics, teaching experience in the B.Ed. module: Personnel Management, a module offered by means of distance education at the University of South Africa, is to…

This article reviews previous studies of the effects of implicit and explicit corrective feedback on SLA, pointing out a number of methodological problems. It then reports on a new study of the effects of these two types of corrective feedback on the acquisition of past tense -ed. In an experimental design (two experimental groups and a control…

In this study we examined how good and weak students of literature interact with short literary stories. We focused on differences in the use of cognitive and affective reading activities, and in the extent to which good and weak students adapt their activities to (parts of) the story they are reading. 19 Dutch tenth-grade students from 8 classes…

This study explored the effects of a full-day preschool program on 4-year-old children. The study compared the development of a group of children (N = 403) who attended the preschool program on a half-day basis during the 1999-2000 school year (the last year the half-day program was in place) with the development of a group of children (N = 418)…

In a study investigating the effects of student engagement in inquiry learning through the development of Web sites, nearly every student reported having enjoyed the project, and the majority scored an A or B for their project grade. However, neither enjoyment nor high achievement on this performance task necessarily translated into high scores on…

This report contrasts the characteristics of border and nonborder districts in Texas from both a demographic and student achievement standpoint. The information in this report should also inform and strengthen border initiatives, such as those emphasized at the 2006 U.S.-Mexico Border Governors Conference. The study sought to answer three…

The study described in this paper outlines an attempt to explore those factors that contribute to learning performance improvement in laboratory instruction. As a case study, the educational methodology involved in a basic microcontroller course was analyzed. Traditional lab sessions based on the control of peripherals with low interactivity have…