Effective science instruction and associated student learning is reliant upon a strong foundation of teacher content knowledge. This study of the "Praxis?" General Science Content Knowledge Test from May 2006 to June 2016 investigates content knowledge of 28,688 general science teacher candidates. Examinees performed well on "Life…

Latinx students make up 77.8% of the English learner (EL) population in the United States (Department of Education, 2017). However, there is a subpopulation of Latinx ELs who are: English-dominant, born in the United States, and identified as long-term English learner (LTEL). ELs who are not reclassified after 6 or 7 years are categorized as LTEL…

Background/Context: Historical studies of this volatile period in educational history (1960-2003 tend to focus on educational policy and/or curriculum, but rarely address changes in learning theory. Numerous historical studies have traced how psychologists, psychometricians, policymakers, and social scientists have dismissed the intellectual…

Using a unique database from Hungarian primary schools, this study investigates whether academic self-assessment and educational aspirations differ between Roma minority and non-Roma majority students with similar cognitive skills and abilities. I find that Roma students have lower self-assessment, on average, than their non-Roma classmates with…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the demographic characteristics of middle school students on their mathematics performance on the STAAR examination. More specifically, this study examined the effect of the variables gender, ethnicity, and at-risk status, separate and collectively, on the four mathematics components…

While many standardized assessment measures exist to track child mental health treatment outcomes, the degree to which such tools have been adequately tested for reliability and validity across race, ethnicity, and class is uneven. This paper examines the corpus of published tests of psychometric properties for the ten standardized measures used…

Validity studies of college admissions tests have found that, on average, students who are Black or Hispanic earn lower freshman grade-point averages (FGPAs) than predicted by these test scores. This differential prediction is used as a measure of bias. These studies, however, conflate student and school characteristics. The differential…

Background/Context: Spurred by changes in federal policy, Response to Intervention (RTI) has witnessed increased adoption across states and districts in the past several decades (Berkeley et al., 2020). Originating in the special education field, RTI involves a shift from a uniform instructional approach to a tiered instructional approach…

This study leverages six years of public prekindergarten (pre-K) and kindergarten data (N = 22,469) from the Boston Public Schools (BPS) to examine enrollment in BPS pre-K from 2012-2017 for students from different racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic groups. The largest differences in enrollment emerged with respect to race and…

The Major Field Test in Business (MFTB) is a nationally administered student evaluation that measures the accumulated knowledge of undergraduates enrolled in a four-year degree program. Research to date has focused primarily on understanding how different variables correlate with performance on this standardized test -- such as student grades,…

Purpose: Teachers' ability attributions play an important role in students' educational outcomes. Perceptions of academic abilities, however, are subject to biases. This study aims to examine ethnic biases in homeroom teachers' ability attributions in Hungarian primary schools. Design/methodology/approach: Using a unique database combining survey…

Years of teaching experience have long been taken as an important indicator of teacher and school quality in primary and secondary schools. However, research on the effects of teacher years of experience on student outcomes has shown mixed results. To investigate the source of variation causing these mixed results, this study examined a broad…

This report is an updated version of analyses undertaken in previous years (Gill and Crawford, 2016; Gill, 2017; Gill, 2018) looking at the impact of the introduction of new accountability measures (Progress 8) on the qualifications and subjects taken by students at the end of Key Stage 4 (KS4). The focus of this report is on changes to the uptake…

The study's purpose was to determine the effectiveness of charter school programs in increasing academic achievement in students with disabilities who received special education services within one charter management organization. The study reviewed student achievement on a state standardized assessment in ELA and Mathematics. Relationships…

Academic achievement in American high schools is increasingly defined in terms of quantifiable values. Despite being designed to produce favorable data, explicit standardized-test preparation has an insignificant impact on scores and is counterproductive to the cultivation of attributes necessary for success in higher education and effective civic…