GRADES OR AGES: Grade 12. SUBJECT MATTER: Social studies. ORGANIZATION AND PHYSICAL APPEARANCE: Six major topics are presented for study: natural, historical, political, economic, cultural, and future heritage. Each topic is divided into a listing of concepts to be introduced, skills to be developed, goals or understandings to be reached,…

Discusses situated cognition as a movement from epistemology, considers the construction of mental models, and describes a study of twelfth graders that investigated the significance of a conceptual model provided at the beginning of the learning process. Results show that mental models are constructed in dependence on the learning situation.…

This study considers the importance of contextual effects on the quality of assessments on item bias and differential item functioning (DIF) in measurement. Often, in educational studies, students are clustered in teachers or schools, and the clusters could impact psychometric issues yet are largely ignored by traditional item analyses. A…

Youth smoking and physical inactivity are significant public health issues, with implications for both health and education stakeholders, as school-based policies and programs have the potential to reach a broad population of youth to address these issues. Knowledge exchange tools designed around comprehensive school-level data collection systems…

At a time when many teenagers are consumed by such activities as text-messaging, blogging, and social networking, more middle and high school students than in the past have mastered the formal "basic" writing skills needed to express ideas or share information, national assessment results released last week show. But just small proportions--33…

This study reports findings from an analysis of the 2002 Chinese National Physics Curriculum Guidelines and the alignment between the curriculum guidelines and two most recent provincial-level 12th-grade exit examinations in China. Both curriculum guidelines and test content were represented using two-dimensional matrices (i.e., topic by level of…

Test-based accountability programs are designed to promote improved standards of teaching and learning within the systems of education that they are connected to. Brenan [Brenan, A. L. (2006). "Perspectives on the evolution and future of educational measurement." In: Robert (Ed.), "Educational measurement" (4th ed., pp. 1-16).…

Our research objectives focused on monitoring (i) students' activities during experimental teaching phases in an out-of-school gene technology laboratory, and (ii) potential relationships with variables such as work group size and cognitive achievement. Altogether, we videotaped 20 work groups of A-level 12th graders (n = 67) by continuous…

This report presents the number of high school graduates, the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR), and dropout data for grades 9 through 12 for public schools in school year 2006-07. The counts of graduates, dropouts, and enrollments by grade (which serve as the denominators for the graduation and dropout rates) are from the National Center…

As technology advances continue to impact K-12 schools, online education options offer alternative choices for both teaching and learning. Library media specialists, long committed to providing physical and intellectual access to instructional materials, have responded to changing needs in this online world. They had previously created a virtual…

The Nation's Report Card[TM] informs the public about the academic achievement of elementary and secondary students in the United States. Report cards communicate the findings of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a continuing and nationally representative measure of achievement in various subjects over time. The National…

In this paper we explore the influence of students' personalized notion of "small" numbers based on real life experiences on their understanding of limits. Tests were conducted on two samples of students. The first sample, consisting of students in the XII grade, had been taught limits using an informal approach (i.e., without recourse to the…

Creative and critical thinking have been traditionally considered as involving independent skills and dispositions. However the definition of critical thinking has been gradually reconsidered to include skills and dispositions through which one opens new links instead of scrutinizing existing links in a closed analysis. Experimental studies have…

Despite emphasis and progress in developing collaborative inquiry in computer-supported collaborative learning research, little attention has been given to examining how collective learning can be assessed in computer-supported collaborative learning classrooms, and how students can have agency in assessing their own collaborative process. We…

Non-completion of senior secondary schooling continues to be a matter of concern for policy makers and practitioners in Australia today. Despite the efforts of governments to improve participation and retention rates, 30% of students drop out of school before completing Year 12. Further, some students remain at school, just biding their time until…