Proof of academic performance often serves as the litmus test for maintaining instructional practices and programs. Just as the national focus on academic improvement has gained momentum, so too has another movement calling for character education. Educators find themselves caught in the middle, questioning whether character education is just…

SpringBoard is a program in Mathematics and English Language Arts for students in grades 6 through 12. The College Board first began work on developing rigorous instructional content and assessments in the early 1990s through a program called Pacesetter. While the original focus of Pacesetter was 4th year high school courses, Pacesetter users…

In many organizations, collaborating with peers, sharing resources, and codifying know-how are not typical facets of work activity. For such organizations, knowledge management support must help people identify and orient to opportunities for collaboration and sharing, articulate values and best practices, and assimilate sharing knowledge as an…

The need for an environment conducive to achievement for diverse learners is especially challenging at the middle and high school levels, where more students with learning challenges are included in the general education program, but teachers tend to be less tolerant of disruptive and distractible behaviors. Thus, students who do not conform to…

The physical education curriculum in the state of South Carolina is representative of a trend towards increasing instruction in health-related fitness concepts. In 1994 the South Carolina state legislature mandated that the required physical education course in high school include one semester of lifetime fitness and one semester of personal…

Measuring History complements the cases presented in Wise Social Studies Practices (Yeager & Davis, 2005). Yeager and Davis highlight the rich and ambitious teaching that can occur in the broad context of state-level testing. In this book, the chapter authors and I bring the particular state history tests more to the fore and examine how…

The ACT is an educational achievement test that measures the typical content and skills learned from college preparatory curricula. Consequently, the ACT can be used not only to predict college success, but also to provide direct feedback to high school teachers about the effectiveness of their teaching. ACT results also assist teachers in…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) It's Education, Stupid: Greenspan Stresses the Importance of Education to Improving Job Prospects, Incomes, and…

New software tools for data analysis provide rich opportunities for representing and understanding data. However, little research has been done on how learners use these tools to think about data, nor how that affects teaching. This paper describes several ways that learners use new software tools to deal with variability in analyzing data,…

This article reports the general findings of a survey study designed to extend knowledge about high school teacher attitudes toward the inclusion of students with disabilities in general education classrooms. Specifically, the study examined the extent to which high school teacher attitudes toward inclusion are affected by classroom experience…

The task of successfully preparing teachers in the United State to effectively work with an ever-increasing culturally and linguistically diverse student body represents a pressing challenge for teacher educators. Unfortunately, much of this practice of equipping prospective teachers for working with learners from different backgrounds revolves…

This handbook contains information for high school educators--teachers, curriculum coordinators, counselors, and principals--as they prepare students to take the Prairie State Achievement Examination (PSAE). The first section explains the purpose of the PSAE, gives timelines and test-day schedules, and shows how the PSAE is constructed. The rest…

This bulletin reports facts concerning the salaries, the amount of education, and the amount of experience in teaching of men and of women in public and in private secondary schools in the United States. It shows the typical condition and the variations from it of each fact for each group, and makes certain obvious comparisons between the groups.…

This study examines the relationships between student literacy performance and discussion-based approaches to the development of understanding in 64 middle and high school English classrooms. A series of hierarchical linear models indicated that discussion-based approaches were significantly related to spring performance, controlling for fall…

The Advanced Placement Program® (AP®) is dedicated to providing high school students opportunities to enroll in college-level courses while in high school. The advantages of such accelerated opportunities are both financial and educational. The AP Program is available internationally. As a result of its widespread availability, considerable effort…