A major problem facing educators in the United States is how to determine when the nation's five million English language learners (ELL) are ready to exit language-learning programs, i.e. to be "reclassified" as fluent English proficient (R-FEP) and placed in mainstream classrooms without additional language support. No Child Left Behind…

Ensuring quality in and through teaching and learning has become a fundamental global concern. Emanating from a colloquium on "Quality Assurance and Teacher Education" hosted by University College Dublin in 2010 and funded by the European Educational Research Association, this book interrogates how quality cultures can be fostered in the…

Using data to improve educational practice in schools has become a popular reform strategy that has grown as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Districts and schools across the United States are under a great deal of pressure to collect and analyze data in hopes of identifying student weaknesses to implement corrective action plans…

Teachers' observations of student performance in reading are abundant and insightful but often remain internal and unarticulated. As a result, such observations are an underutilized and undervalued source of data. Given the gaps in knowledge about students' reading comprehension that exist in formal assessments, the frequent calls for teachers'…

For more than four decades the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has tracked the achievement of U.S. students in major academic subjects. This national resource is the only assessment that states and now many urban districts can look to as an objective yardstick of their performance over time, relative to national benchmarks, and…

Response to Intervention provides a continuum of instruction across intensity levels through multitiered intervention models. A lot of work to date has been devoted to how to configure tiers to ensure the appropriate increases in intensity. Much less work has been devoted to making adjustments "within" tiers to attempt to forestall the need for…

Governments frequently introduce education policy reforms to improve the educational outcomes of pupils. These often have simultaneous effects on pupils because they are implemented in the same schools and at the same time. In this paper, we evaluate the relative and multiple overlapping effects of two flagship British educational policies--the…

Evidence from Project STAR has suggested a considerable advantage of being in small classes in early grades. However, the extra benefits of additional years in small classes have not been discussed in detail. The present study examined the additional effects of being in small classes for more than 1 year. We find that once previous grade…

In today's educational environment, schools struggle to meet the academic needs of every student. Many schools are challenged by the use of a response-to-intervention framework in which too many students need strong interventions. This article details a data-driven, decision-making response-to-intervention reading team model in which teachers,…

This paper examines the King's Oxfordshire Assessment Project, which took place in the UK and explored the use of coursework as a means of terminal assessment. In particular, it considers the findings of the six English teachers who were involved. In a standards-based curriculum all six teachers supported 100% coursework. The paper looks at how,…

Assessments have risen in prominence in colleges of business, in response to requirements of accrediting agencies. Among the forms of assessment are embedded exams within courses, often in the form of multiple-choice tests near the end of the semester. These tests can be stand-alone comprehensive exercises, or comprise a small portion of a larger…

The paper analyzes the emergence of home education in European post-communist countries after 1989. The case of the Czech Republic representing the development and characteristic features of home education in the whole region is studied in detail. Additional information about homeschooling in other post-communist countries are provided wherever…

With a grant from the Council of the Great City Schools' Senior Urban Education Research Fellowship Program, the authors began a project designed to identify the roots of the dropout problem in the District of Columbia by identifying middle grades students' exhibiting behaviors associated with dropping out of high school. Their plan was to use DC…

The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationship between academic achievement, as measured by high school GPA and cumulative undergraduate GPA, peer tutoring, academic self-concept, and personal self-concept. A total of 50 students (treatment=29, control=21) from a university in Western, NY participated in this study. The results…

In her new book, Betty Demarest describes a bold agenda for education reform--one that is firmly grounded in a synthesis of educational research about learning, teaching, and the contexts of education. The author's "learning-centered" framework includes: (1) a broad and balanced set of education goals, (2) a multi-faceted concept of…