Recently, student outcomes have bubbled to the top of debates about how to evaluate teaching in community and liberal arts colleges, universities, and professional schools, but even more international attention has been riveted on how outcomes are being used to evaluate teachers and administrators K-12 (Harris, 2012; Rowen & Raudenbush, 2016;…

The continuous poor performance of South Africa's learners is detrimental to its developing economy. The need for education change prompted two universities to initiate a system-wide change strategy in a poorly performing school district. The leverage for change was leadership development, involving school principals and district officials. The…

The re-conceptualisation of texts over the last 20 years, as well as the development of a multimodal understanding of communication and representation of knowledge, has profound consequences for the reading and understanding of multimodal texts, not least in educational contexts. However, if teachers and students are given tools to…

In this quantitative study, a survey was developed and administered to middle and high school teachers to examine what factors motivated them to implement problem-based learning (PBL). Using Expectancy-Value Theory by Eccles et al. (1983) and Self-Determination Theory by Ryan and Deci (2000b) as the theoretical framework, this instrument measured…

Public schools with impressive records of serving lower-performing students are often overlooked because their average test scores, even when students are growing quickly, are lower than scores in schools that serve higher-performing students. Schools may appear to be doing poorly either because baseline achievement is not easily accounted for or…

In order to change the direction of mathematics education, the training of elementary teachers in the United States needs to be of equal or higher quality than top preforming countries. However, pre-service elementary teachers in the United States fall behind their peers in other countries in mathematical content knowledge and mathematical…

Assessment forms an important part of instruction. Assessment that aims to support learning is known as formative assessment and it contributes student's learning gain and motivation. However, teachers rarely use assessment formatively to aid their students' learning. Thus reviewing the factors that limit or support teachers' practices of…

In the fall of 2012, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) instituted a sweeping reform of its teacher evaluation system with the introduction of Recognizing Educators Advancing Chicago's Students (REACH). This report finds teachers with the lowest scores on the REACH Students teacher evaluation system are overrepresented in schools serving the most…

When an effective principal is at the helm of a school, students benefit. Principals play a critical role in establishing a school's climate and culture and in selecting and developing teachers, among other roles. Indeed, school leadership is second only to direct classroom teaching among school-level influences on achievement. Although there may…

The purpose of this study is to explore the validity evidence supporting the high-leverage practices (HLPs) of the ETS® National Observational Teaching Exam (NOTE) assessment series, a kindergarten through 6th grade teacher licensure assessment. HLPs include "tasks and activities that are essential for skillful beginning teachers to…

In this article the current empirical research on morality and giftedness is reviewed with an emphasis on moral sensitivity. The component of moral judgment has been the most studied aspect in morality. Although high-ability students have been shown to be superior in moral judgment when compared to average-ability students, morality includes other…

Libraries are under pressure to prove their worth and may not have achieved this fully successfully. There is a resultant growing requirement for value and impact measurement in academic and research libraries. This essay reviews the natural history of library performance measurement and suggests that proof of worth will be measured by the…

This article presents the first half of an address at the 2011 Jon C. Dalton Institution on College Student Values. Drawing on personal reflections regarding his higher education experiences, the author argues that cultivating a robust disposition for benevolence requires a synthesis of intellectual engagement, critical self-reflection, and…

A key factor in legal and moral judgments is intent. Intent differentiates, for instance, murder from manslaughter. Is this true for all moral judgments? People deliver moral judgments of many kinds of actions, including harmful actions (e.g., assault) and purity violations (e.g., incest, consuming taboo substances). We show that intent is a key…

When the editors of this journal asked the author to provide his evaluation of the concept of "paradigms" and provide a commentary on Joseph Maxwell's article on the subject, he responded positively because he believes that too often important ideas are not clarified, discussed, and debated in the literature. In this article, he first defines some…