While such recent legislation as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) mandates monitoring the progress of all students--including English language learners (ELL)--the validity and fairness of assessment tools for such students remains a major concern for educational researchers and practitioners. The rapid increase in the number of ELL students…

This article deals with an on-line soils module project. The two goals for this part of the project were to determine if an on-line soils module could be successfully used for asynchronous instruction of two diverse populations and to determine which demographic factors are related to test performance. The module was presented to an eighth-grade…

This report documents the process undertaken to produce scales in three cognitive domains: knowing, applying, and reasoning. Included are the final scales showing differences among countries, as well as within countries. TIMSS 2003 is the third and most recently completed round of IEA's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, a very…

The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of the Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices, the Naglieri Nonverbal Abilities Test (NNAT), and the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) in selecting for ethnically diverse students who may be gifted. The participants of the study were 175 students enrolled in Grades 3-5 and Grade 8 in a…

This study considered middle school mathematics teachers use of rubrics to score non-traditional tasks. A group of eighth-grade teachers attended a two-day workshop where they evaluated assessment tasks and discussed the use of an associated scoring rubric. Scored samples of student work submitted by the teachers indicated that they had difficulty…

During recent decades, educational research has dealt with the contribution of the learning environment to the accomplishment of educational goals, such as improvement of academic achievement and motivation. In this research, an intervention program was implemented into the learning environment of science-technology classes at the junior high…

In this article, the authors talk about the action research study they conducted involving literature discussion groups. They observed how students spontaneously took up roles as questioners, as emotional responders, as group facilitators, and as information providers without having been assigned roles in literature circles. They then selected…

This volume describes the technical aspects of TIMSS 2003 and summarizes the main activities involved in the development of the data collection instruments, the data collection itself, and the analysis and reporting of the data. The thirteen chapters contained herein are: (1) Overview of TIMSS 2003 (Michael O. Martin and Ina V. S. Mullis); (2)…

Only one out of five high school teachers believes that students are learning to write well according to research from Public Agenda. Test results confirm their opinion. In 1998, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) administered a writing assessment to gauge fourth- and eighth-grade students' proficiency in writing narrative,…

This student employee handbook offers tips on planning, design process, and presentation of a student Lunar Nautics project. Each section includes mission, task, challenge, and guide questions. With the activities presented, students will learn to design a Lunar Lander, Lunar Miner, and Lunar Base; investigate the geography and geology of the moon…

The first U.S. charter school opened in 1992, and the scale of the charter movement has since grown to 4,000 schools and more than a million students in 40 states plus the District of Columbia. With this growth has also come a contentious debate about the effects of the schools on their own students and on students in nearby traditional public…

The Carnegie Corporation of New York is associated with the very foundations of literacy going back to the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie himself and of the Corporation in its early years. Andrew Carnegie's legacy includes over 2,500 free public libraries that he saw as a link "bridging ignorance and education." In fact, Carnegie, the…

When the author and her teaching colleague assessed their 7th and 8th grade students' research papers, they realized that although the papers demonstrated proper structure, the students had not gained meaningful understanding of their topics. Although the teachers had carefully prepared students to write, they had not ensured that students had…

In 2003, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) included a special focus on problem-solving. This report reviews the problem-solving aspects of each study in order to compare and contrast the nature of problem solving in each assessment. The report's authors develop…

When marking GCSE data handling coursework, the author was repeatedly reminded just how poor the level of statistical understanding is among students. In response to a feeling that the teaching of handling data topics was limited, the author and her colleague designed a project with Y8 students to try to teach statistics for a deeper…