Declining enrolments in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines and a lack of interest in STEM careers are concerning at a time when society is becoming more reliant on complex technologies. We examine student aspirations for STEM careers by drawing on surveys conducted annually from 2012 to 2015. School students in…

Rural schools have repeatedly been subjected to standardizing state and federal education policies that seek to minimize variance in instructional systems and increase the number of college- and career-ready graduates. The Race to the Top policy agenda combined standards-based and accountability-based reforms to meet these objectives and once…

The purpose of the current study is to investigate social support (from parents, classmates, teachers, and close friends) as a protective factor in the association between depression and suicidal ideation. Data on students' levels of social support, depression, and suicidal ideation were collected from 399 9th-grade students using the Child and…

Paying attention to the planning of lessons represents a crucial teaching task. This paper analyses teachers' framing of lesson objectives and their descriptions of how they would introduce particular mathematics topics. Connections between the objectives and the instructional strategies employed, were also studied. The study involved 75 South…

Turkey is ranked at the 54th out of 72 countries in terms of science achievement in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey conducted in 2015, which is a very big disappointment for that country. The aim of this research was to determine factors affecting Turkish students' science achievements in order to identify the…

Although the relationships between family income and student identification for gifted programming are well documented, less is known about how school and district wealth are related to student identification. To examine the effects of institutional and individual poverty on student identification, we conducted a series of three-level regression…

The "Annual Disability Statistics Supplement" is a companion report to the "Annual Disability Statistics Compendium." The "Supplement" presents statistics on the same topics as the "Compendium," with additional categorizations by demographic characteristics including age, gender and race/ethnicity. In…

We report results of two studies examining the relation between decoding and reading comprehension. Based on our analysis of prominent reading theories such as the Simple View of Reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002) and the Self-teaching Hypothesis (Share, 1995), we propose the Decoding…

Bayesian Knowledge Tracing is used very widely to model student learning. It comes in two different forms: The first form is the Bayesian Knowledge Tracing "hidden Markov model" which predicts the probability of correct application of a skill as a function of the number of previous opportunities to apply that skill and the model…

Dependent effect size estimates are a common problem in meta-analysis. Recently, a robust variance estimation method was introduced that can be used whenever effect sizes in a meta-analysis are not independent. This problem arises, for example, when effect sizes are nested or when multiple measures are collected on the same individuals. In this…

Mixtures of item response theory (IRT) models have been proposed as a technique to explore response patterns in test data related to cognitive strategies, instructional sensitivity, and differential item functioning (DIF). Estimation proves challenging due to difficulties in identification and questions of effect size needed to recover underlying…

Much of the research on the use of simulations in the political science classroom focuses on how simulations model different events in the real world, including political campaigns, international diplomacy, and legislative bargaining. In the case of American Politics, many simulations focus on the behavior of Congress and the legislative process,…

We followed established best practices in concept inventory design and developed a 12-item inventory to assess student ability in statistical reasoning in biology (Statistical Reasoning in Biology Concept Inventory [SRBCI]). It is important to assess student thinking in this conceptual area, because it is a fundamental requirement of being…

The dramatic growth and dispersal of immigrant families has changed the face of public education at a time when states are experiencing increased school accountability pressures under the No Child Left Behind Act and its recent successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act. Of particular concern is how these demographic shifts affect the academic…

Relativizing the popular belief that student effort is the key to success, this article finds that effort in the most advanced mathematics course in US high schools is not consistently associated with college calculus performance. We distinguish two types of student effort: productive and ineffective efforts. Whereas the former carries the…