As a construct definition, the current study develops a cognitive model describing the knowledge, skills, and abilities measured by critical reading test items on a high-stakes assessment used for selection decisions in the United States. Additionally, in order to establish generalizability of the construct meaning to other similarly structured…

In response to changes government funding and policies over the past five years, the Australian tertiary sector has entered an increasingly competitive climate. This has forced many universities to become more strategic in attracting increased numbers of PSTs. Providing accelerated learning opportunities for PSTs is viewed as one way to gain…

Mobile learning has been recommended for motivating students on field trips; nevertheless, owing to the complexity and the richness of the learning resources from both the real-world and the digital-world environments, information overload remains one of the major concerns. Most mobile learning designs provide feedback only for multiple choice…

Within the following text, educational reform is examined to reveal how and to what extent Ontario secondary teachers (n = 87) have implemented educational changes that had a direct impact on students (n = 396), themselves, and curriculum. Our mixed methods data, while limited in scope, indicated that secondary school teachers were largely content…

This study examined the relationship between high school mathematics curricula and student achievement and course-taking patterns over 4 years of college course taking for a sample of over 10,000 students from 32 postsecondary 4-year institutions. Three types of curricula were studied: National Science Foundation (NSF) funded curricula, the…

Literature shows that feedback that is specific, immediate and goal-oriented is effective on (pre-service) teachers' performance. Synchronous coaching gives this kind of feedback. Due to immediateness of feedback, pre-service teachers can suffer from cognitive load. We propose a set of standardised keywords through which this performance feedback…

States are in a crucial phase of implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which outline the knowledge and skills that students in grades kindergarten through 12 are expected to learn in mathematics and English language arts (ELA) to be prepared for college and careers. As of July 2013, 45 states and the District of Columbia have…

The researcher investigated three types of factors, academic, commitment, and social on college sophomore's decisions to persist at predominately White institutions. The academic factors (academic integration, academic rigor), commitment (goal commitment and institutional commitment) and social factors (social integration and racial climate) were…

This study was carried out to find out if there was any significant difference in learning English collocations by learning with different dominant experiential learning styles. Seventy-five participants took part in the study in which they were taught a series of English collocations. The entry knowledge of the participants with regard to…

Legal and risk management issues substantially impact the operations of colleges and universities, which face escalating compliance requirements in an increasingly litigious environment. Failing to assess legal liability issues and to constructively address them with risk management processes create vulnerability to claims and litigation,…

Traditional pronunciation instruction and instruction in second language (L2) phonetics have been shown to improve learners' L2 accent in some, though certainly not all, cases. Learners in intermediate and advanced Spanish FL courses have shown modest improvement in the pronunciation of some L2 phones after receiving such instruction.…

This paper examines primary school-aged children's lived experiences of the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests. NAPLAN emulates the neoliberal accountability agendas of English and US education systems, with results published on the My School website. Research on the impact of NAPLAN to date has focused predominantly…

Summer Enrichment Workshop (SEW) is a 3-week enrichment program held at The University of Alabama (UA) Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for students identified as gifted and talented. The faculty of the College of Education, Program of Gifted and Talented (GT), formed a partnership with a College of Engineering faculty member who mentored the graduate student…

This study is an investigation of the acquisition of existential constructions (ECs) in English and in Spoken Arabic. It is the first of its kind in that it examines the acquisition of the pieces and the features that form ECs; namely, existential "there," the copula, definiteness, and agreement for English and existential "fii," definiteness,…

This study considers the degree to which two quantitative indices--Lexiles and Coh-Metrix--discriminate across levels of difficulty and types of beginning reading texts. The database consisted of 444 texts, representing seven text types that are part of reading/language arts instruction. These text types were distributed across seven levels of…