The National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is intended to assess all Australian students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 to ensure equity and inclusion. This paper explores the extent to which equity and inclusion are achieved for students with disability through NAPLAN reporting. Document analysis of publicly accessible NAPLAN…

In 2012, New York education officials and the state's teachers union announced one of the nation's most aggressive programs for teacher and principal evaluation--the Annual Professional Performance Review system (APPR)--which required that 40% of an educator's evaluation be based on student growth, using a combination of the state assessment and…

Interest in 21st century skills has brought concomitant interest in ways to teach and measure them. Games hold promise in these areas, but much of their potential has yet to be proven, and there are few examples of how to use the rich data from games to make inferences about players' knowledge, skills, and attributes. This article builds an…

The ubiquity of mobile devices makes them well suited for field-based learning experiences that require students to gather data as part of the process of developing scientific inquiry practices. The usefulness of these devices, however, is strongly influenced by the nature of the applications students use to collect data in the field. To…

This article presents first results of an ethnographic research project in a Luxembourgish primary school that accompanied the development of a school project by children from the fifth grade. Analysing the data children themselves collected with Kodak Zi8 cameras in order to document their project activities, it investigates their possibilities…

The practical need for multidimensional measures of fidelity of implementation (FOI) of reform-based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) instructional materials, combined with a theoretical need in the field for a shared conceptual framework that could support accumulating knowledge on specific enacted program elements across…

Interactions between conceptual and procedural knowledge influence the development of mathematical competencies. However, after decades of research, these interrelations are still under debate, and empirical results are inconclusive. The authors point out a source of these problems. Different kinds of knowledge and competencies only show up…

This article describes some of the conceptual and methodological issues that arise when researchers use teacher logs to measure classroom instruction. Data and examples come from the Study of Instructional Improvement, which used teacher logs to study patterns of literacy instruction in schools implementing three comprehensive school reforms. Over…

This study compares three variations in how researchers construct middle childhood social networks: (1) with "friendships" or "affiliations" as a relational tie; (2) with children providing "self reports" of relationships, or in addition, "multi-informant reports" of relationships in which they are not involved; and (3) whether network computation…

This study examined urban elementary teachers' knowledge and practices in teaching science while supporting English language development of English language learning (ELL) students. As part of a larger 5-year research project in the United States, the study involved 38 third-grade teachers who participated in the first-year implementation of a…

In this article, the authors explore which conditions support the success of literacy coaches. Because the literacy coach position is a relatively new one, this article examines some of the questions related to designing and implementing the position of the literacy coach, and the potential influence of the position on student achievement. The…

"How much popcorn will our classroom hold?" This intriguing question sparked a terrific integrated science and math exploration that the author conducted with fifth-and sixth-grade students. In the process of finding the classroom's volume, students developed science-process skills (e.g., developing a plan, measurement, collecting and interpreting…

This article explores the potential of using students' science notebooks to help elementary teachers monitor conceptual understanding. Data came from 25 teachers and their 4th- and 5th-grade students working on a unit on electricity. At the time data were collected, 8 of the teachers had received professional development on science content…

Despite a rise in the use of handheld computers in classrooms, meaningful learning with personal digital assistant (PDA) technology remains poorly studied. This article reports results from an evaluation of customized handheld data collection software, the BioKIDS Sequence, which was used during an 8-week biodiversity curriculum unit by 5th and…