Many special education (SPED) students are failing the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT) despite writing instruction provided by SPED teachers. The purpose of this study was to understand teachers' perceptions about why students were failing the literacy/writing test and document whether evidence-based assessment and writing practices…

In May 2016 an Invitational Symposium on the Reading for Understanding (RfU) Initiative was held in Alexandria, Virginia. Co-hosted by ETS and the Council of Chief State School Officers, the symposium brought together 160 state and local education leaders to examine the results of the RfU initiative. The goal of the U.S. Department of…

Student engagement in learning is critical to the development of lifelong learners. Many research studies have found that student engagement is congruent with teacher student interaction, school culture, and student achievement. However, in the research literature, little has been documented about the role of the school leader in ensuring teachers…

The purpose of this case study is to examine the understanding and implementation of college and career readiness skills among career and technical education (CTE) teachers and administrators in a technical high school setting. A qualitative study was conducted at one technical high school located in an urban setting in the state of Connecticut.…

Researchers have found executive functioning (EF) to be important for reading and math performance but have paid less attention to their role in writing. Van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) identified three levels of writing: microstructure, macrostructure, and superstructure. The existing work on EF and writing has several limitations: researchers have…

Extension educators have been challenged to be cost effective in their educational programming. The cost effectiveness ratio is a versatile evaluation indicator for Extension educators to compare the cost of achieving a unit of outcomes or educating a client in similar educational programs. This article describes the cost effectiveness ratio and…

Previously, researchers have relied on asking young children to plot a given number on a 0-to-10 number line to assess their mental representation of numbers 1 to 9. However, such a ("conventional") number-to-position (N-P) task may underestimate the accuracy of young children's magnitude estimates and misrepresent the nature of their…

Funding organisations are increasingly asking academics to show evidence of the economic and social value generated by their research. These requests have often been associated with the emergence of a so-called "new social contract for research" and are related to the implementation of new research evaluation systems. Although the…

Purpose: Cognitive effort is a clinically important facet of linguistic processing that is often overlooked in the assessment and treatment of people with aphasia (PWA). Furthermore, there is a paucity of valid ways to index cognitive effort in PWA. The construct of cognitive effort has been indexed for decades via pupillometry (measurement of…

Bloom's taxonomy is a resource commonly used to assess the cognitive level associated with course assignments and examination questions. Although widely utilized in educational research, Bloom's taxonomy has received limited attention as an analytical tool in the anatomical sciences. Building on previous research, the Blooming Anatomy Tool (BAT)…

It is necessary for public managers to be able to evaluate programmes in the context of complexity. This article offers key learning and reflections based on the experience of facilitating the evaluation of complexity with a range of public sector partners in Scotland. There have been several articles that consider evaluating complexity and…

What is the appropriate unit of analysis for the study of classroom discourse? One common analytic strategy employs individual discourse moves, which are coded, counted and used as indicators of the quality of classroom talk. In this article we question this practice, arguing that discourse moves are positioned within sequences that critically…

Many students who underachieve in schools may not be learning as effectively as they could. Direct assessments such as the Academic Competence Evaluation Scales (ACES), School Motivation and Learning Strategies Inventory (SMALSI), and the Academic Task Attack Checklist System (ATACS) can be used to evaluate students' knowledge and use of…

The five thoughtful papers included in this issue of "Educational Researcher" ("ER") raise new questions about the use of value-added methods (VAMs) to estimate teachers' contributions to students' learning as part of personnel evaluation. The papers address both technical and implementation concerns, considering potential…

This media literacy article introduces a questioning framework for analyzing screen media with students and provides an example analysis of two contemporary commercials. Investigating screen conventions can help students understand the persuasive functions of commercials, as well as how the unique sensory experience of screen viewing affects how…