The purpose of this program evaluation was to evaluate the first year of an acceleration program that allowed students who were retained a grade level for not performing on academic level in early elementary school an opportunity to rejoin their age appropriate class. The primary focus of the evaluation was to evaluate the effectiveness of an…

In 2010, the federal government increased accountability expectations by placing more emphasis on monitoring teacher performance. Using a model that focuses on the New York State teacher evaluation system, that is comprised of a rubric for observation, local student assessment scores, and student state assessment scores, this…

Although adolescents are currently the most frequent users of the Internet, many youngsters still have difficulties with a critical, reflective, and responsible use of the Internet. A study was carried out on teaching with a digital role-play game to increase students' reflective Internet skills. In this game, students had to promote a fictional…

The POWERSOURCE[c] intervention is intended as a generalizable and powerful formative assessment strategy that can be integrated with any mathematics curriculum. POWERSOURCE[c] includes both a system of learning-based assessments and an infrastructure to support teachers' use of those assessments to improve student learning. The core undertaking…

The purpose of this study was to investigate secondary school students' unmediated peer assessment skills. Specifically, 36 seventh graders, without receiving any kind of support, were anonymously assigned to reciprocally assess their peers' science web-portfolios. Additionally, students' attitudes towards and intentions about the use of…

Maze tasks have appealing properties as progress-monitoring tools, but there is a need for a thorough examination of the psychometric properties of Maze tasks among middle school students. We evaluated form effects, reliability, validity, and practice effects of Maze among students in Grades 6 through 8. We administered the same (familiar) and…

As the largest international study ever taken in history, the Trend in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) has been held as a benchmark to measure U.S. student performance in the global context. In-depth analyses of the TIMSS project are conducted in this study to examine key issues of the comparative investigation: (1) item flaws in mathematics…

Successful school reform is dependent on the quality of decisions made by educational leaders. In such decision making, educational leaders are charged with using sound research findings as the basis for choosing school reform initiatives. As part of the debate regarding the usability of various evaluative research designs in providing information…

Zoom in on the academic skills students are required to learn in reading, writing, speaking/listening, and language! This book cuts through all of the Common Core jargon and gets right to the heart of what students need to learn now. "Big Skills for the Common Core" is packed with engaging strategies you can use immediately to improve your…

West Virginia uses multiple state assessments to measure student achievement and inform program decision-making. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 requires participation of students with disabilities in statewide assessments to be consistent with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 2001 and current with…

Two studies examined the effects of four types of teachers' evaluative feedback on Chinese students' self-efficacy in English vocabulary acquisition. In Study 1, a random sample of Grade 8 students (N = 79) learned prefixes and received either formative or summative feedback after failure in test. The results showed that students who received…

Teacher observations have become a national education phenomenon, mandated by federal policies and promoted by philanthropists. They are crucial components of teacher evaluation systems that often have high stakes for teachers and school systems, but have sparked little innovation. Recent calls to make teacher evaluations better, faster, and…

This article seeks to substantiate the need for the prognostic assessment of the degree to which school students are prepared to master new types of activity, which underlie their design of an individual learning route at an appropriate senior stage of learning. The authors discuss the concept of project competence as an integral characteristic of…

Textbooks are one of the primary teaching tools frequently used in schools and most teachers use them in their classrooms (Sanchez and Valcarcel, 1999). Since there are a lot of abstract concepts in science education, images in science textbooks play a vital role in the learning process (Kenan et al., 2011). Concretization of abstract concepts may…

This study analyzes six seventh grade Israeli mathematics textbooks, examining (1) the extent to which students are required to justify and explain their mathematical work, and (2) whether students are asked to justify a mathematical claim that is stated by the textbook or a mathematical claim that they themselves generated when solving a problem.…