Students using self-directed learning platforms, such as Duolingo, cannot be adequately assessed relying solely on responses to standard learning exercises due to a lack of control over learners' choices in how to utilize the platform: for example, how learners choose to sequence their studying and how much they choose to revisit old material. To…

This is the fourth report in a series of studies conducted to investigate ACT's fee waiver program. Although the three prior reports in this series provide valuable descriptive information about ACT fee waiver usage and test-day absenteeism among students who use fee waivers, this brief provides information directly from students who registered…

Educational inequality due to family socioeconomic status (SES) has been the focus of both public dialogue and education research in the United States for many years. The current study aims to understand how educational inequality due to family SES has changed in the United States. Specifically, the study focuses on the changes in achievement gaps…

Culturally responsive assessment practices include validated measures appropriate for use with diverse populations. Considering the increasing population of Latinx students in U.S. schools, measures need co-validated English and Spanish (SEHS) language forms. This study examined the Social Emotional Health Survey--Secondary with Latinx students…

The most recent OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey enables educators, policymakers and the wider community to compare Australian students with each other, as well as with their counterparts across the world. PISA measures the extent to which 15-year-old students near the end of compulsory education have acquired the…

The practice assignments in a mathematics textbook or course can be arranged so that most of the problems relating to any particular concept are massed together in a single assignment, or these related problems can be distributed across many assignments -- a format known as spaced practice. Here we report the results of two classroom experiments…

In humans' daily life, people experience different levels of anxiety. Some experiences a low level of anxiety, others experience incredibly high. Anxiety significantly affects people in different forms. Higher education students experience anxiety attributed to different factors and one of which includes test anxiety. This study sought to describe…

Traditional letter and number grades are inaccurate and harmful to children, while research indicates that standards-based grading is both more accurate and better for all stakeholders. However, despite standards-based report cards (SBRCs) coming in many forms, the best number and arrangement of performance level descriptors (PLDs) remains…

Ever since the 1983 landmark study, "A Nation at Risk", was released, educators have been examining the effectiveness of instructional time in American schools (Pedersen, 2012). However, school calendars have remained stagnant and seemingly a product of society and economy, tied to agriculture, for over 100 years (Turner & Finch,…

A listener's explicit knowledge of the links between phonetic variants and social categories can be referred to as their sociophonetic knowledge. The goal of this dissertation was to directly examine the degree to which sociophonetic knowledge influences listeners' ability to process and encode lexical tokens produced in different accents, with…

The State NAEP program only reports the mean achievement estimate of a subgroup within a given state if it samples at least 62 students who identify with the subgroup. Since some subgroups of students constitute small proportions of certain states' general student populations, these low-incidence groups of students are seldom sufficiently sampled…

Discrete Event Simulation (DES) is a novel system modeling technique that allows for the evaluation of the potential costs and personnel needed for mental health services in school. A case study is presented to illustrate how DES could be used by a school's decision makers to help plan for implementation of an integrated mental health service…

The purpose of this quantitative causal-comparative study was to determine the extent of differences in student achievement scores on the ACT based on enrollment in preparation courses in large group settings, for students graduating from 2011 to 2020 at a private high school in the southwestern United States. Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory…

Mathematics anxiety is a problem for elementary students and affects mathematics self-concept, mathematics performance, and student's perceptions of their ability to learn mathematics. This mixed method study examined the perceptions of fourth and fifth grade low-performing students and their parents concerning their mathematics anxiety, if there…

Many methods are used to measure interrater reliability for studies where each target receives ratings by a different set of judges. The purpose of this study is to explore the use of hierarchical modeling for estimating interrater reliability using the intraclass correlation coefficient. This study provides a description of how the ICC can be…