The ACT Assessment is a measure of skills in English, mathematics, reading, and science reasoning necessary for college coursework. This booklet includes four sections designed to help the assessment user. Section 1, "Components of the ACT Assessment," contains general information about the assessment for counselors and college advisors…

EXPLORE is an every-student program that assesses the academic progress of eighth graders, helps them explore the wide range of career options, and assists them in developing a high school coursework plan. EXPLORE can function as a stand-alone program or as a point of entry into the American College Testing (ACT) Program's Educational Planning and…

The U.S. General Accounting Office surveyed 758 higher education institutions (of which 430 responded) to determine how much federal student financial aid is going towards payment for remedial courses courses needed by new college students to attain adequate proficiency in basic skills prior to taking college level courses. In addition, nine…

This report presents data on high school performance indicators for the 1999-00 school year in Chancellor's District high schools. Data are provided on: background; students (numbers and ethnicity); state accountability indicators in English and language arts (full cohort and seniors in the cohort); state accountability indicators in mathematics…

This collection of papers examines key failures in modern U.S. education and shows how parents, policymakers, and teachers can make changes that will raise the level of student performance. The papers were presented at a 1997 conference designed to examine how elementary and secondary school students learn and are taught in the classroom. The…

Presents fundamentals of the author's approach to teaching, drawn from her experiences in New York City concerning (1) caring; (2) high expectations; (3) creating interest; (4) keeping students busy to avoid discipline problems; (5) performance-based assessment; and (6) parent involvement. Techniques and tactics for teaching mathematics are also…

This chapter provides an overview of statistical issues arising in work on educational assessment and school accountability, organized around some of the most consequential misunderstandings. The article proceeds via a series of nine vignettes describing misunderstandings of statistical uncertainty in educational assessment and school…

A problem with interpretations of differences in mathematic achievement between students from Asian countries and those from the United States is the seemingly implicit assumption of the cultural homogeneity of Asian societies. Researchers rarely measure the effects of variables within cultures that are hypothesized to be related to differences…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) Education Programs Receive Little Funding: Striving Readers One of Only a Handful of Programs to Receive Small…

Over the course of the fifteen years since 1991, Latvia has been undergoing rapid political changes from a party controlled state to a market economy. These changes have affected the system of education. The issue of quality and equity of educational outcomes is gaining increasing importance as schools are expected to adjust to the new economic…

The purpose of this report was to describe the first year of the implementation of a bilingual program consisting of three levels of instruction: preliterate, beginning, and intermediate. Students were placed in one of the three levels following state and district guidelines. The instruction implemented was designed to serve students with little…

Helpful Opportunities for Pupil Enrichment (Project HOPE) was designed to provide services to Chinese-speaking and Spanish-speaking students of limited English proficiency in grades 6, 7, and 8, as well as their parents and siblings and the instructional staff. In 1991-92, the project enrolled 160 male and 159 female students. The project was to…

Home environments have been linked to cognitive development and academic performance, with suggestions that family factors exert more influence on language and literacy learning than on mathematics achievement. This study's purpose was to learn how selected family factors might be differentially related to primary grade achievement in reading and…

This study examined elements of the climate of middle-grades schools that are associated with schools' effectiveness in terms of the engagement and achievement of their students, with special emphasis on gender equity. Drawn from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, data on 9,020 eighth graders from 377 middle-grades schools were…

Change over time in the cross-achievement level regard of seventh-grade students for teammates in small heterogeneous cooperative learning groups was studied for 184 middle school students (55 percent Hispanic Americans, 27 percent Whites, 14 percent Blacks, and 3 percent Asian Americans) in Los Angeles County (California). Student perceptions…