Recent reform efforts in mathematics education have stimulated a focus on learning trajectories. At the same time, a global increase in high-stakes testing has influenced instructional practices. This study investigated how four fourth grade teachers within a school planned and enacted lessons to understand what mediated their planning and…

In this study, researchers used a customized 360-degree method to examine the frequency with which 1,546 men and 721 women leaders perceived themselves and were perceived by colleagues as using 10 relational and 10 task-oriented leadership behaviors, as addressed in the Management-Leadership Practices Inventory (MLPI). As hypothesized, men and…

The authors examine the impact of a program designed to encourage students to read popular business magazines. The results suggest that a reading program can improve student knowledge of current events, but that more work is needed to encourage students to attain timely knowledge of the current environment of business.

This proposal presents the results of a case study involving five 8th grade Taiwanese classes, two mathematics and three science classes. These classes used a new method of testing called confidence wagering. This paper advocates the position that confidence wagering can predict the accuracy of a student's test answer selection during…

Stakeholders of the educational system assume that standardized tests are transparently about the subject content being tested and therefore can be used as a metric to measure achievement in outcome-based educational reform. Both analysis of longitudinal data for the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) exam and agent based computer…

This dissertation argues that changing ideas about race and engagement with race science were at the heart of a major transformation of political science in the 1920s, a transformation that I characterize as "becoming modern." This transformation was at once conceptual--visible in the basic categories and theoretical apparatus of the…

The Investigators hypothesized cooperating teachers' evaluations of candidates in clinical practice and field experiences would possess higher scores than those provided by clinical and education division faculty. However, the reasons for the higher scores proved to be much more complex than originally thought. While it was assumed that teachers…

Academic integrity has been a perennial issue in higher education. Undoubtedly, the advent of the Internet and advances in user-friendly technological devices have spurred both concern on the part of faculty and research interest in the academic community regarding inappropriate and unethical behavior on the part of students. This study is…

Examinees who take high-stakes assessments are usually given an opportunity to repeat the test if they are unsuccessful on their initial attempt. To prevent examinees from obtaining unfair score increases by memorizing the content of specific test items, testing agencies usually assign a different test form to repeat examinees. The use of multiple…

Assistive technology approaches to aid students with visual impairments are becoming commonplace in schools. These approaches, however, present challenges for assessment because students' level of access to different technologies may vary by school district and state. To better understand what assistive technology tools are used in reading…

The importance of higher education has never been clearer. Educational attainment--the number of years a person spends in school--strongly predicts adult earnings, as well as health and civic engagement. Yet relative to other developed nations, educational attainment in the United States is lagging, with young Americans who heretofore led the…

New Zealand schools increasingly use inquiry to understand and address complex and persistent issues. This requires schools to have committed Lead Teachers with deep knowledge about inquiry. The collection of studies in this book have been compiled by the research team at the Woolf Fisher Research Centre, University of Auckland, to illustrate the…

Psychometricians continue to introduce new approaches to setting cut scores for educational assessments in an attempt to improve on current methods. In this paper we describe the Item-Descriptor (ID) Matching method, a method based on IRT item mapping. In ID Matching, test content area experts match items (i.e., their judgments about the knowledge…

Increasing numbers of universities are offering courses in online and hybrid formats. One challenge in online assessment is the maintenance of academic integrity. We present a thorough statistical analysis to uncover differences in student performance when online exams are administered in a proctored environment (i.e., in class) versus an…

Value-added measures of teacher quality may be sensitive to the quantitative properties of the student tests upon which they are based. This paper focuses on the sensitivity of value- added to test-score-ceiling effects. Test-score ceilings are increasingly common in testing instruments across the country as education policy continues to emphasize…