The National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) has stated that "the overall achievement goal for American students is performance that qualifies at the Proficient level or higher" (Loomis & Bourke, 2001, p. 2). The Institute for Educational Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education went even further, "The Proficient level…

The famed playwright Harold Pinter, having just been introduced as a very good writer, was once asked by a six-year-old boy if he could do a "w." The author suspects that "w" was a difficult letter for this young man, and he judged the writing capability of others accordingly. This student's assumption--that being a "good…

The influence of gender beliefs on cognitive task performance has been demonstrated repeatedly for adults. For children, there is evidence that gender beliefs can substantially impede or boost math performance--a task where gender differences in favour of boys declined over past decades. Therefore, we examined this phenomenon using the Mental…

This study compared oral personal and fictional narratives of diverse (African American and Caucasian) students with and without learning disabilities. Naturalistic conversation with embedded narrative prompts and supports provided the context for narrative elicitation. The participants were 82 fourth to seventh graders from urban and suburban…

Productive knowledge work and high-level literacy are essential for engagement in a Knowledge society. In the research reported in this article, students were engaged in sustained collaborative knowledge building in science and social studies. The vocabulary growth of 22 students over Grades 3 and 4 was traced, based on their entries to Knowledge…

A team of authors, including a fourth-grade teacher and his professor from a local graduate school, describe culminating elementary lessons with an index card recap and peer review. In an urban district that traditionally struggles with standardized testing, this activity prompts students to summarize and communicate the day's lesson and key ideas…

This study reports on the perceptions and instructional practices of Grades 3 through 5 special education teachers in a school district that implemented a multitiered response to intervention (RTI) framework for the previous 5 years. The authors used focus groups and interviews to examine special education teachers' perceptions of RTI. In…

In this qualitative study, I examined and interpreted the literacy instruction of a fourth grade instructor who identified herself as a student-centered teacher. I sought to understand and interpret the beliefs and attitudes of my participant, Julie. Through seven unstructured interviews and five observations, I collected, and simultaneously…

The results of formative assessments are regularly used to inform important instructional decisions (e.g., targeted intervention) within a response to intervention (RTI) system of teaching and learning. The validity of such instructional decision-making depends, in part, on the alignment between formative measures and the academic content…

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has expended considerable effort to ensure high quality in data collection by developing standardized materials and survey operation procedures and using well-trained professional administrators. However, schools are allowed to minimize the disruption associated with pulling students out of…

Major federal education initiatives, including the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, have highlighted the importance of teacher quality in improving student achievement. The federal government has committed significant funding and resources to professional development programs for teachers through Title II of the Act and other initiatives. There…

Automated scoring by means of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) has been introduced lately to improve the traditional human scoring system. The purposes of the present study were to develop a LSA-based assessment system to evaluate children's Chinese sentence construction skills and to examine the effectiveness of LSA-based automated scoring function…

The aim of this study is to explain how planning educational trips out of school environments for training purposes should be as well as to determine the opinions and the practices of prospective science teachers. The study that lasted for two years was carried out in parallel with the elective course "Science Education in Informal Learning…

Science IDEAS is an evidence-based model that reflects interdisciplinary research findings that support the integration of literacy (e.g., reading comprehension) within science instruction in grades K-5. Presented is a framework for planning integrated science and literacy instruction in which six elements (hands-on investigations, reading,…

This study focuses on how the treatment effects of a teacher professional development initiative in science differed by school capacity. In other words, the authors are primarily concerned with treatment effect heterogeneity. As such, this paper complements ongoing evaluation of the average treatment effects of the initiative over time. The…