This quantitative dissertation used the Pearson "r" coefficient to determine whether relationships exist between local salary supplements for public school teachers in the state of Georgia and selected teacher characteristics as well as student achievement data. The researcher selected the percentage of teachers with 11 or more years of…

Tuition dependency, federal accountability measures, and desire for the prestige associated with college rankings all necessitate institutional attention to admission, retention, and graduation rates. The need to maintain institutional enrollment compels admissions officers to consider an applicant's likelihood of persistence in the admissions…

Many existing teacher evaluation and reward systems do not capture variation in teachers' ability to improve student performance on standardized tests. Improved access to longitudinal data systems that link teachers to students facilitates the development of systems that incorporate student achievement gains into teacher evaluations. However, two…

Even though it often feels like standardized testing is a relatively recent phenomena, it has been around at least since the 1800s, when in China, those that wanted a government job were required to take a test on their expertise of Confucian philosophy and poetry. During the Industrial Revolution, standardized tests were a quick way to test large…

A growing body of research showing that grade retention serves as an educationally low-quality placement has raised increasing concerns about whether the use of standardized tests in making decisions concerning grade retention conforms to current standards for appropriate and nondiscriminatory test use. This article examines the extent to which…

Now administered in 27 states and affecting 65 percent of all students, high school exit exams are gaining influence on teaching and learning because they constitute tests with extraordinarily high stakes. But what happens when students fail a high school exit exam? Few studies address the best way to remediate students in these situations.…

This article describes the construction of a procedure for dynamic assessment of the expressive grammar of children already identified with language impairments. Few instruments exist for the dynamic assessment of language, and those that have been developed have been largely used to successfully differentiate language impaired from culturally…

Researchers have developed indices to identify persons whose test results "misfit" and are considered statistically "aberrant" or "unexpected" and whose measures are consequently potentially invalid, drawing the test's validity into question. This study draws on interviews of pupils and their teachers, using a sample…

College students' epistemological belief in their academic performance of mathematics has been documented and is receiving increased attention. However, to what extent and in what ways problem solvers' beliefs about the nature of mathematical knowledge and thinking impact their performances and behavior is not clear and deserves further…

This study examined the impact of a read-aloud accommodation on standardized test scores of reading comprehension at grades 4 and 8. Under a repeated measures design, students with and without reading-based learning disabilities took both a standard administration and a read-aloud administration of a reading comprehension test. Results show that…

Once a passionate advocate for injecting greater competition and accountability into the U.S. education system, the New York University scholar Diane Ravitch realized three years ago that her views had evolved to a point where she was contradicting herself on a regular basis. Like any good historian, she decided to set the record straight. Her…

Written essays are a common feature of classroom and high stakes standardized tests at many age levels. However, little is known about how small alterations in the writing task affect students' writing, an issue made more important by the increasing use of task alterations for students with disabilities. In the present study, 140 college students…

Purpose: To examine whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) differ from normally developing peers in motor skills, especially those skills related to timing. Method: Standard measures of gross and fine motor development were obtained. Furthermore, finger and hand movements were recorded while children engaged in 4 different timing…

Despite advances in the science of teaching reading, there still exists a small percentage of students who fail to make the expected progress in reading-related skills, notwithstanding attempts at intervention. Even if these struggling readers learn to decode adequately, fluency remains a problem for many, and little is known about the…

This paper evaluates the impact of teaching innovations, introduced in public primary schools under the Children Resources International (CRI) Program, on student outcomes. We estimate students' learning based on their scores on standardized tests. We match schools and children within the treatment and comparison group and find that the CRI…