How effective is a community's high school in educating its students? Drawing from the work of leading researchers and educators, the Alliance for Excellent Education has identified 10 key elements that every high school should have in place to ensure that all its students are successful. This checklist can help identify the strengths and…

When asked questions, children often avert their gaze. Furthermore, the frequency of such gaze aversion (GA) is related to the difficulty of cognitive processing, suggesting that GA is a good indicator of children's thinking and comprehension. However, little is known about how teachers detect and interpret such gaze signals. In Study 1 teaching…

This study took a pragmatic approach to examining the effects of task difficulty on L2 oral output. Twenty native English speakers and 59 Japanese students of English at two different proficiency levels produced speech acts of requests and refusals in a role play task. The task had two situation types based on three social variables:…

Fully developed definitions of evidence-based practice incorporate evidence from family perspectives, as well as evidence from research on the effectiveness of particular interventions. Systems for appraising research evidence typically place qualitative analyses at lower levels. The argument in this article is that qualitative data offer a…

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of aging on the storage of visual and spatial working memory according to Logie's model of working memory (1995). In a first experiment young, elderly, and very old subjects carried out two tasks usually used to measure visual span (Visual Patterns Test) and spatial span (Corsi Block Tapping test).…

In this case study, we investigate three Chinese boys' self-efficacy beliefs learning English as a second language across English language learning tasks and home-based and school-based contexts. Participants reported higher self-efficacy to complete listening and speaking activities than during reading and writing activities. All participants…

Computer-assisted instruction systems have been broadly applied to help students solve math word problem. The majority of such systems, which are based on an instructor-initiating instruction strategy, provide pre-designed problems for the learners. When learners are asked to solve a word problem, the system will instruct the learners what to do.…

A simple technique, developed by A. Phillips (1987) is used to approximate the covariance between the Mantel-Haenszel log-odds-ratio estimator for a 2 x 2 x k table and the sample marginal proportions. These results are then applied to obtain an approximate variance estimate of an adjusted risk difference based on the Mantel-Haenszel odds-ratio…

The Mantel-Haenszel (MH) procedure has become one of the most popular procedures for detecting differential item functioning. Valid results with relatively small numbers of examinees represent one of the advantages typically attributed to this procedure. In this study, examinee item responses were simulated to contain differentially functioning…

The effects of test difficulty on the perception of examination difficulties and state anxiety are investigated. Thirty undergraduate students were administered the Educational Psychology Recognition Test and Test Perception Inventory to assess task difficulty and perception of exam difficultness. A modified version of the State-Trait Anxiety…

Difficulty levels of 168 randomly generated multiplication problems were obtained by testing 238 fifth-graders. Variables concerning the number of operations, digits carried, and magnitude of the digits were defined, and a least-squares procedure was used to construct structural models accounting for 60-70 per cent of observed problem difficulty…

Based on a PhD dissertation submitted to the University of Illinois.

One of a series of reports on the International Project for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (in Mathematics).