Gives results of a national survey of foreign language teachers, department chairpersons, and state coordinators and consultants to find out their most pressing questions about foreign language teaching and learning. Respondents' concerns included testing and evaluation, promoting interest in foreign language study, developing oral proficiency in…

Examines students' difficulties in reading literature and suggests methods for helping them to develop and improve skills necessary for the mature reading of literature. (MM)

Model checking is a crucial part of any statistical analysis. As educators tie models for testing to cognitive theory of the domains, there is a natural tendency to represent participant proficiencies with latent variables representing the presence or absence of the knowledge, skills, and proficiencies to be tested (Mislevy, Almond, Yan, &…

This book summarizes current brain research and shows how teachers can use this knowledge in the classroom every day. It explores how the brain works, how students' emotions and stress affect their ability to learn, how the physical classroom environment influences learning, and what forms of assessment work best. An introduction discusses the…

Item parameter estimates vary for a variety of reasons, including estimation error, characteristics of the examinee samples, and context effects (e.g., item location effects, section location effects, etc.). Although we expect variation based on theory, there is reason to believe that observed variation in item parameter estimates exceeds what…

A two-year ethnographic study of dialogic literary circles in Spain explored the learning experience of adults who participated in them. In a dialogic society, educational projects providing real opportunities for transformation and overcoming inequalities usually had a dialogic orientation and promoted instrumental learning as well as critical…

For one instructor, learning that personal response, particularly emotions, had no place in the construction of a public self began in high school senior English class where students learned to never use personal pronouns in their writing. The lesson continued in college where she majored in journalism and literature under the direction of…

The availability of item response times made possible by computerized testing represents an entirely new type of information about test items. This study explores the issue of how to represent response-time information in item banks. Empirical response-time distribution functions can be fit with statistical distribution functions with known…

Year-to-year rater variation may result in constructed response (CR) parameter changes, making CR items inappropriate to use in anchor sets for linking or equating. This study demonstrates how rater severity affected the writing and reading scores. Rater adjustments were made to statewide results using an item response theory (IRT) methodology…

In current study we interviewed 21 mathematics teachers who aspired to reform-based mathematics instruction. It was our hope to establish whether there were common traits among this teacher population, which could have influenced their supportive disposition towards innovative instruction. The participants shared several characteristics. (1) They…

One mathematics lesson was planned by two Grade 2 teachers together. Their separate teaching of it was videotaped, and each teacher was interviewed before and after her lesson. The "same" lesson resulted in different sets of worthwhile learning outcomes. In this research report, the notion of situated cognition is used as a tool for analysis of…

This study examines the learning of five pre-service teachers investigating a question stemming from their mathematics teaching as part of a final course project in their elementary teacher education program. Analysis of video recordings of group meetings and interviews indicate that as pre-service teachers completed their projects they developed…

We examine aspects of flexible mathematical thinking in middle school students and its contribution to the growth of their mathematical understanding. We inductively analyzed data collected from video-episodes of an interactive, problem-solving based after-school mathematics class. Flexibility is essential in such classrooms since students must…

This resource book contains reviews, written by children, of 375 "can't put down" children's books. Reviews were selected from over 10,000 submissions, the results of a national survey in which children reviewed their favorite books. The book makes it easy to locate books by listing: (1) title; (2) author; (3) number of pages; (4) genre…

The National Education Longitudinal Studies (NELS) program is a long-term effort that now encompasses the educational experience of youth from three decades, the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The NELS program studies the educational, vocational, and personal development of students at various grade levels, and the personal, familial, social,…