In an effort to address severe budget deficits at both the state and local levels, schools and educational programs are being asked to trim budgets. The Advanced Placement Program is one program that will certainly be scrutinized. This article presents a general overview of AP social studies, a brief history of the AP social studies program, and…

Standardized examinations, such as those developed and disseminated by the ACS Examinations Institute, are artifacts of the teaching of a course and over time may provide a historical perspective on how curricula have changed and evolved. This study investigated changes in organic chemistry curricula across a 60-year period by evaluating 18 ACS…

Guided-inquiry lab activities with bean beetles ("Callosobruchus maculatus") teach students how to develop hypotheses, design experiments, identify experimental variables, collect and interpret data, and formulate conclusions. These activities provide students with real hands-on experiences and skills that reinforce their understanding of the…

Understanding human environmental health is difficult for high school students, as is the process of scientific investigation. This module provides a framework to address both concerns through an inquiry-based approach using a hypothesis-driven set of experiments that draws upon a real-life concern, environmental exposures to lead (Pb2+). Students…

Most theories of analogical transfer focus on similarities between the learning and transfer domains, where transfer is more likely between domains that share common surface features, similar elements, or common interpretations of structure. We suggest that characteristics of the learning instantiation alone can give rise to different levels of…

Sensitivity to spacing information within faces improves with age and reaches maturity only at adolescence. In this study, we tested 6-16-year-old children's sensitivity to vertical spacing when the eyes or the mouth is the facial feature selectively manipulated. Despite the similar discriminability of these manipulations when they are embedded in…

This article describes the middle grades program at Georgia College's John H. Lounsbury College of Education, which educates and trains middle school teachers. It describes the school's field-based teacher preparation program in which a mentor leader guides the candidates. The middle grades education program is a two-year, field-intensive…

Validity evidence based on test content is of essential importance in educational testing. One source for such evidence is an alignment study, which helps evaluate the congruence between tested objectives and those specified in the curriculum. However, the results of an alignment study do not always sufficiently capture the degree to which a test…

The activation relationship theory, primarily focused on parental stimulation of risk-taking along with parental control during exploration, predicts that boys will be activated more than girls by their fathers. This theory may explain why fathers engage in rough-and-tumble play (RTP) with children more frequently than mothers, especially with…

International tests of achievement narrowly measure specific academic subjects, but have larger educational policy implications. These tests come to summarize national education systems and are used in national and international discourse. However, students with disabilities are being entirely excluded from participation in the discourse of…

Education has been powerfully affected by the rise of a neoliberal political, economic and cultural agenda. The Australian experience since the 1980s is outlined. Educators need to understand neoliberalism, and also to think about the nature of education itself, as a social process of nurturing capacities for practice. Education itself cannot be…

Primary prevention of men's intimate partner violence (IPV) toward women in dating relationships is an important area of psychological inquiry and a significant concern for counselors working with college student populations. Previous research has identified that certain beliefs condoning or accepting physical, sexual, and psychological violence…

His name is Brett Schmidt, and he is a college student with Autism. His greatest challenge of having autism is communication. When he first applied to Briarcliffe College, he was given an e-mail address to the Campus Portal. He had to train himself to look at the portal frequently for communication and information. On the start of the semester, he…

Highly abstract predicates (e.g. "think") present a number of difficulties for language learners (Gleitman et al., 2005). A partial solution to learning these verbs is that learners exploit regularities in the syntactic frames in which these verbs occur. While agreeing with this general approach to learning verbs, we caution that this…

The No Child Left Behind Act mandated the development of statewide alternate assessments to measure the academic achievement of students with the most significant cognitive disabilities. The valid assessment of all test takers is critical due to its high-stakes nature and the use of its results to inform instruction. Given the heterogeneity of the…