The U.S. public has consistently favored standardized testing in the schools, preferably with consequences (or "stakes") riding on the results, ever since the first polls taken on the topic several decades ago. Results from different polls approaching the topic in different ways suggest that nearly all Americans would like to see…

"Metacognition," or the set of skills indicated as critical thinking in the domain of business education, constitutes an important aim in many educational programmes. At the same time, empirical studies demonstrate that teaching metacognitive skills is much harder than teaching cognitive ones. Moreover, the assessment of metacognitive skills poses…

This article features schools and school districts with successful induction programs, all easily replicable. Increasingly, research confirms that teacher and teaching quality are the most powerful predictors of student success. In short, principals ensure higher student achievement by assuring better teaching. To do this, effective…

Ten years after publication of the UK Government's strategy for drug misuse in 1995, Tackling Drugs Together, the impact of drug education and prevention programmes remains less than desired. The 1995 strategy envisaged a new emphasis on education and prevention and there have been developments since then in drug education, especially with…

This article presents the results of research about students' and teachers' use of an interaction framework (THINK) to guide group communication about problem solving. Students who used the THINK framework demonstrated greater gains in problem-solving achievement than students who did not use the framework.

Young American adults are spending more and more time on activities like sending e-mail messages or blogging, and less time on books, the arts, politics, and their studies, with the result being that they are cut off from the worlds beyond their social circuit. Observers say that the disengagement of students from the liberal-arts curriculum is…

Putting prospective teachers through standardized interviews regarding their approach to the job might fulfill a sorting function, but it can prove to be time-consuming on both sides. Online applications, though they can be relatively quick and easy, tend to give a school district too little information about the real-world potential of…

Since 1990, the privately organized Teach For America has deployed more than 10,000 graduates to disadvantaged schools plagued by teacher shortages. The recruits take part in five-week summer institutes that include four weeks of student teaching. Because states have begun stepping up their requirements for Teach For America participants, most…

This article reports how two prominent Democrats are demanding to know more about the problems identified in the implementation of the federal Reading First program, including whether criminal violations may have occurred and what Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings may have known about the problems while she was a White House aide. In the…

A chemistry outreach program to enthuse students of elementary school levels through employing popular children's literature Harry Potter is presented. The outreach activity performance found the students discovering new skills, learning more about science, and participating enthusiastically in the program without any added incentive from their…

Schneider found no statistically significant differences between the intervention and comparison groups on the school-level Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) analyzed in the study. The findings may have been affected by only three schools implementing more than one-third of the total math problems in each year and grade. In addition, the…

"Career Academies" were developed more than 30 years ago as a drop-out prevention strategy and targeted youth considered most at risk of dropping out of high school. More recently, "Career Academies" have broadened the kinds of students they serve, consistent with efforts to integrate rigorous academic curricula with career…

The American Association of Community Colleges' (AACC) Plus 50 Initiative is a three-year initiative launched in June 2008 and funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies. It was created to support a pilot group of two-year institutions to develop or expand campus programs that engage plus 50 learners. The initiative focuses on three types of…

A teacher's sense of {instructional} efficacy has been considered a critical variable in student academic performance. Researchers Tschannen-Moran and Hoy Woolfolk (2001, p.783) defined teachers' {instructional} efficacy as a teacher's judgment of his or her capabilities to bring about desired outcomes of student engagement and learning, even…

This study was designed to examine the effectiveness of a ninth grade transition program at a suburban high school in Louisiana. Student data were analyzed from two groups of first time freshmen who indicated a need for help in mathematics: one without a transition program and one with a transition program. Academic data included standardized test…