A changing, economically competitive world has necessitated reform in mathematics education. Yet mathematics anxiety has been a prevalent concern among educators and others in our society for decades. Some students tend to be more anxious about the testing process and can often freeze up, others just cringe when they are confronted with any form…

Differential item functioning (DIF) occurs when an item on a test, questionnaire, or interview has different measurement properties for one group of people versus another, irrespective of true group-mean differences on the constructs being measured. This article is focused on item response theory based likelihood ratio testing for DIF (IRT-LR or…

Value-added models have become popular in research and pay-for-performance plans. While scholars have focused attention on some aspects of their validity (e.g., scoring procedures), others have received less scrutiny. This article focuses on the extent to which value-added scores correspond to other indicators of teacher and teaching quality. The…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the contributions of domain-general cognitive resources and different forms of arithmetic development to individual differences in pre-algebraic knowledge. Children (n = 279, mean age = 7.59 years) were assessed on 7 domain-general cognitive resources as well as arithmetic calculations and word problems…

Childhood disabilities entail a range of immediate and long-term economic costs that have important implications for the well-being of the child, the family, and society but that are difficult to measure. In an extensive research review, Mark Stabile and Sara Allin examine evidence about three kinds of costs--direct, out-of-pocket costs incurred…

Citizen science is a term used to describe the engagement of ordinary citizens in scientific tasks like observation, measurement, and computation. A series of technological innovations, such as the Internet, the upgrade of mobile phones from communication devices to networked mobile personal measurement devices, and the introduction of…

Developmental predictors of children's fraction concepts and procedures at the end of fourth grade were investigated in a 2-year longitudinal study. Participants were 357 children who started the study in third grade. Attentive behavior, language, nonverbal reasoning, number line estimation, calculation fluency, and reading fluency each…

The study reviewed in this paper examined the impact of offering financial aid informational materials on the postsecondary expectations of high school students. Approximately 5,000 students from five low-achieving high schools in Ontario, Canada, were invited to complete an online survey about their postsecondary aspirations. About 1,600 students…

This study compared the accuracies of four differential item functioning (DIF) estimation methods, where each method makes use of only one of the following: raw data, logistic regression, loglinear models, or kernel smoothing. The major focus was on the estimation strategies' potential for estimating score-level, conditional DIF. A secondary focus…

Growth modeling using longitudinal data seems to be a promising direction for improving the methodology associated with the accountability movement. Longitudinal modeling requires that the measurements of ability are comparable over time and on the same scale. One way to create the vertical scale is through concurrent estimation with…

The purpose of this study was to analyze participants' levels of hemoglobin as they performed arithmetic mental calculations using Optical Topography (OT, helmet type brain-scanning system, also known as Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy or fNIRS). A central issue in cognitive neuroscience involves the study of how the human brain encodes and…

"Report of a Workshop on the Scope and Nature of Computational Thinking" presents a number of perspectives on the definition and applicability of computational thinking. For example, one idea expressed during the workshop is that computational thinking is a fundamental analytical skill that everyone can use to help solve problems, design…

The concepts of Newtonian mechanics, fluids, and ideal gas law physics are often treated as separate and isolated topics in the typical introductory college-level physics course, especially in the laboratory setting. To bridge these subjects, a simple experiment was developed that utilizes computer-based data acquisition sensors and a digital gram…

The concept of definite integral is almost always introduced as the Riemann integral, which is defined in terms of the Riemann sum, and its geometric interpretation. This definition is hard to understand for high school students. With the aid of mathematical software for visualisation and computation of approximate integrals, the notion of…

Through professional development activities involving action research, middle-grades teachers at this author's school learned how to honor students' prior knowledge and experience by finding out about their K-5 computational development. Rather than complaining about what their students did not know, they learned to appreciate results from their…