Mathematics questions from the General Certificate of Secondary Education, taken in England at the end of compulsory education, were incorporated into a similar Swedish national test. Significant national differences were found in scores of the lowest 40% of the cohort. Results are discussed in relation to high dropout and failure rates in English…

Assesses the value of Key Stage 2 Mathematics national test scores as indicators of student achievement and whether standards are rising. Investigates mathematical attainment levels of Year 6 children on Mathematics 11 and on the national mathematics test. Discusses the results. (CMK)

Examines the relationship between teacher quality and California high school student mathematics achievement, investigating student dropout rates in conjunction with faculty characteristics. Results suggest that poverty strongly affects student achievement. A direct relationship exists between teacher experience and preparation and student…

Examined the effect of part-time work intensity on high school mathematics and science coursework completed and its indirect effect on 12th grade achievement. Longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample indicated that there was a significant negative effect of part-time work intensity on coursework. The indirect effect on 12th-grade…

Investigated whether stereotype threat would depress college women's math performance. In one test, men outperformed women when solving word problems, though women performed equally when problems were converted into numerical equivalents. In another test, participants solved difficult problems in high or reduced stereotype threat conditions. Women…

Used Educational Longitudinal Study data to examine the differential impact of reform and traditional instruction on the mathematics performance and attitudes of black and Hispanic American tenth and twelfth graders. Twelfth graders receiving reform instruction had significantly higher achievement than those receiving traditional instruction.…

South Carolina's technical assistance centers focus on improving low student mathematics and science performance. They provide assistance and professional development to teachers in poor, isolated rural schools. Curriculum Leadership Institutes (which renew and enhance teachers' content knowledge and pedagogy) are a primary part of the centers.…

Examined age and gender differences in verbal skills and visuomotor skills at kindergarten, in achievement in reading and mathematics at Grade four, and the link between skills at kindergarten and later achievement. Readiness in auditory memory and verbal associations predicted later reading achievement while readiness in number skills and visual…

Used data from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to model developmental trajectories across middle childhood. Found that individual trajectories were extremely diverse in level and sometimes in slope. Compared to girls, boys had heterogeneous slopes for math and behavior problems. Compared to boys, girls showed a significantly higher degree of…

Analyzes data on math performance in three developmental courses using chi-square analysis. Finds that enrollment patterns in math courses were related to ethnicity and age but not gender. Relationships were found between pass-fail frequencies and gender, age, and ethnicity, and between grades and ethnicity in two of the three developmental…

Examination of Britain's National Child Development Study data shows that children perform marginally better at 7 and 11 if they spent time with mothers or at a preschool. The British Cohort Study shows that time spent in nurseries effected no mathematics improvement and may have reduced reading vocabulary development. (Contains 20 references.)…

Used data from the 1988 National Education Longitudinal Study to examine relationships between 12 types of parent involvement and 8th-grade mathematics and reading scores. Results showed statistically significant differences in the relationship between parent involvement and student achievement according to race/ethnicity and family income, how…

Studied the importance of language in student test performance on mathematics word problems using items from the National Assessment of Educational Progress mathematics assessment. Results for 1,174 eighth graders show that students who were English language learners scored lower on the math test than proficient English speakers and that…

Researchers ascribe attributional processes a central role within the framework of motivational processes in educational contexts, a point that has been proved by an extremely wide range of empirical evidence. Therefore, it is beyond any controversy that a functional attributional style has positive effects on a series of personal traits and…

The purpose in this study was to illustrate the complexity of the focus on parent involvement as a strategy for enhancing school outcomes by empirically testing the predictive ability of three components of parent involvement on 12th graders' mathematics achievement by race and ethnicity. The authors used data from the NELS:88, which was based on…