The CEPA-English test is used for achievement, selection, and placement purposes. Since this test has heavily influences student's academic futures, it is imperative to ensure that the test functions as intended and provides meaningful results. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the technical quality of the CEPA-English test in…

GRADES OR AGES: Grades 11 and 12. SUBJECT MATTER: Dietetics and home economics. ORGANIZATION AND PHYSICAL APPEARANCE: The guide is divided into two parts. The first part outlines a 2-year course in dietetics, which is divided into ten units. The second part outlines a 1-year, grade 11 course in home economics which is divided into two sections,…

Designed to elicit information for the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972, most of the information required in this questionnaire should be obtainable from the school's records. Information not available from the records is obtained by interviewing the student, using a blank copy of this questionnaire as an interview…

GRADES OR AGES: Grade Twelve. SUBJECT MATTER: This is the second part of a two-part course on body structure and function. The subject matter includes organization, composition, and all the systems of the human body. Laboratory experiments related to first aid are also covered. ORGANIZATION AND PHYSICAL APPEARANCE: The guide contains a preface, a…

GRADES OR AGES: Grade 12. SUBJECT MATTER: Social studies. ORGANIZATION AND PHYSICAL APPEARANCE: Six major topics are presented for study: natural, historical, political, economic, cultural, and future heritage. Each topic is divided into a listing of concepts to be introduced, skills to be developed, goals or understandings to be reached,…

Discusses situated cognition as a movement from epistemology, considers the construction of mental models, and describes a study of twelfth graders that investigated the significance of a conceptual model provided at the beginning of the learning process. Results show that mental models are constructed in dependence on the learning situation.…

This study considers the importance of contextual effects on the quality of assessments on item bias and differential item functioning (DIF) in measurement. Often, in educational studies, students are clustered in teachers or schools, and the clusters could impact psychometric issues yet are largely ignored by traditional item analyses. A…

Youth smoking and physical inactivity are significant public health issues, with implications for both health and education stakeholders, as school-based policies and programs have the potential to reach a broad population of youth to address these issues. Knowledge exchange tools designed around comprehensive school-level data collection systems…

At a time when many teenagers are consumed by such activities as text-messaging, blogging, and social networking, more middle and high school students than in the past have mastered the formal "basic" writing skills needed to express ideas or share information, national assessment results released last week show. But just small proportions--33…

This study reports findings from an analysis of the 2002 Chinese National Physics Curriculum Guidelines and the alignment between the curriculum guidelines and two most recent provincial-level 12th-grade exit examinations in China. Both curriculum guidelines and test content were represented using two-dimensional matrices (i.e., topic by level of…

Test-based accountability programs are designed to promote improved standards of teaching and learning within the systems of education that they are connected to. Brenan [Brenan, A. L. (2006). "Perspectives on the evolution and future of educational measurement." In: Robert (Ed.), "Educational measurement" (4th ed., pp. 1-16).…

Our research objectives focused on monitoring (i) students' activities during experimental teaching phases in an out-of-school gene technology laboratory, and (ii) potential relationships with variables such as work group size and cognitive achievement. Altogether, we videotaped 20 work groups of A-level 12th graders (n = 67) by continuous…

This report presents the number of high school graduates, the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR), and dropout data for grades 9 through 12 for public schools in school year 2006-07. The counts of graduates, dropouts, and enrollments by grade (which serve as the denominators for the graduation and dropout rates) are from the National Center…

As technology advances continue to impact K-12 schools, online education options offer alternative choices for both teaching and learning. Library media specialists, long committed to providing physical and intellectual access to instructional materials, have responded to changing needs in this online world. They had previously created a virtual…

The Nation's Report Card[TM] informs the public about the academic achievement of elementary and secondary students in the United States. Report cards communicate the findings of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a continuing and nationally representative measure of achievement in various subjects over time. The National…