The new emphasis on performance-based assessment holds much promise for assessment in physical education, particularly for the assessment of motor skills. Physical educators want to know if students can perform motor skills and use those motor skills in game and activity settings. However, the viability of performance-based assessment as a formal…

This report on state virtual schools outlines the recent trends associated with virtual high schools over the last 15 years. It notes that early trends indicate that virtual schools are on the rise. The report provides reasons for why the trends have occurred, and describes the Southern Regional Education Board's role in providing information and…

This research study developed a value-added instructional improvement analysis model. North Carolina state testing results were used in regression and residual analyses of student achievement. This analysis allowed for identification of the "most effective" and "least effective" biology teachers in Wake County Public Schools…

This study examined community adults' conceptions of successful early adult outcomes for rural African American adolescents from 2 low-resource communities in the Deep South. Focus groups were conducted with parents, teachers, and community leaders. Parents also completed semistructured phone interviews. The focus groups identified 2 general types…

The chapters in this volume illustrate how teachers are bringing creativity, higher-order thinking, and meaningful learning activities into particular school settings despite pressures of standards and testing. The editors chose the word wise for the title of this book, and they use it frequently to describe the pedagogical practices they have…

Much recent research and funding have focused on building Internet-based repositories that contain collections of high-quality learning resources, often called "learning objects." Yet little is known about how non-specialist users, in particular teachers, find, access, and use digital learning resources. To address this gap, this article…

Within primary and secondary school technology education, engineering has been proposed as an avenue to bring about technological literacy. Different initiatives such as curriculum development projects (i.e., Project ProBase and Project Lead The Way) and National Science Foundation funded projects such as the National Center for Engineering and…

This unit was created as a result of a summer institute sponsored by the National K-12 Foreign Language Resource Center at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. The Center's goal is to improve student learning of foreign languages in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12). In the summer of 1996, the Center offered the Culture and Children's…

This report is based on inspections of mathematics in primary and secondary schools carried out between August 2002 and April 2005. In addition to schools inspected, Her Majesty's (HM) Inspectors also visited primary and secondary schools to observe and describe aspects of best practice. This report also draws on pupils' attainment in Scottish…

Do you spend entirely too much time correcting your students' papers? Do your students' essays and term papers take side trips to nowhere? Is their writing riddled with mechanical errors? Do their lab reports and essays lack specificity and clarity? Writing in the Content Areas, Second Edition is for middle and high school content area teachers…

In every State the public high school is now firmly established as a part of the educational system. It is no longer merely a link between elementary school and the college, but attempts to prepare for intelligent citizenship the common-school pupil who has not the time or the means for requiring a higher education. The public school systems in…

As a profession language educators are paying more attention to teacher-driven research to help clarify and explain those phenomena occurring in our classrooms. The purpose of this paper is to explore the following question: What happens when teachers apply a teacher action research (TAR) strategy for improving their classroom practice? I will…

Purpose: This research, based on a case study carried out in a Portuguese public school, was undertaken with the main purpose of investigating the perceptions of secondary school teachers regarding their principal and his leadership style. Design/methodology/approach: Teachers received a questionnaire which included 57 items, grouped under the…

A school district in the southwestern United States has over the past several years built its infrastructure to support high-quality technology integration by its teachers. The district partnered with a nearby university's educational technology graduate program to develop a digital high school project. Teachers and advanced instructional-design…

In October 2002, Sebastian River High School in Florida developed a literacy system that includes all faculty and staff members. The literacy system identifies roles, responsibilities, and actions for everyone, including daily literacy-related nonnegotiables for all teachers. Now, students who have a history of failure are posting gains of one…