The students who have the most difficulty reaching accountability standards in Wake County Public Schools are those with more than one of the following characteristics: recipients of free or reduced-price lunch, students with disabilities, and/or students with limited English proficiency. The Evaluation and Research Department identified…

In this paper, we provide a description of a CSLP research project that looked at portfolio use within a middle school, the web-based e-portfolio software we have developed within the context of the Quebec educational system, our plans for further development of the tool, and our research plans related to the use of portfolios to support learning.…

In this study, the quality of the computer and Internet based social studies course was investigated. A case study design was chosen to understand, a) how computers are used in the eighth grade classroom, b) what the students' and teachers' perceptions are about the advantages and problems of using computers. Qualitative data sources showed that…

This paper synthesizes research findings from a performance analysis of teacher tasks and the implementation of performance technology. These findings are aligned with design and implementation theories to provide understanding of the complex factors and events that occur during the implementation process. The article describes the necessary…

Teacher retention has been of interest to educational researchers for over three decades. Various reasons for teacher attrition have been cited, including student discipline and motivation problems, working conditions, low salary, and a lack of administrator support. This descriptive survey research sought to determine the present status of…

This paper draws on data gathered from a five-month phenomenological study of middle school students' perceptions of the effects of computer-based technologies on a learning community in an online synchronous environment. Twenty-four eighth-grade students participated in the Web Pen Pals project, a university-secondary telecollaborative…

The James Irvine Foundation launched the Communities Organizing Resources to Advance Learning (CORAL) initiative in 1999 with the goal of improving the academic achievement of children in the lowest-performing schools in five California cities. In 2004, CORAL adopted a more targeted approach toward reaching this goal by integrating a regular…

This report presents the findings of a Project undertaken to address the broad question of how to ensure the engagement with learning of all middle years students and how to encourage in them a higher order of learning objectives and outcomes both now and throughout life. It builds on current nationwide and international efforts at school reform,…

Using large-scale surveys from nine states, the Community Childhood Hunger Identification Project (CCHIP) estimates that 8% of American children under the age of 12 years experience hunger each year. CCHIP operationalizes child hunger as multiple experiences of parent-reported food insufficiency due to constrained resources. The current study…

Academic achievement under a four-day school week is compared to the traditional five-day school week. Test scores from the CAT [California Achievement Test], ITBS [Iowa Test of Basic Skills], TASK [Stanford Test of Academic Skills], SAT [Stanford Achievement Test], TAP [Tests of Academic Proficiency], and MAT [Metropolitan Achievement Test] were…

Reflective thinking is important to young adolescents as they develop their thinking skills. Various instructional methods have been recommended to support reflective thinking, yet the nature of the underlying factors in these methods is unclear. Exploratory factor analysis was used to determine the factors prompting reflective thinking. Results…

In December 2000, the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) was awarded a five-year research and development (R&D) contract to develop and refine a systemic model to improve student achievement in reading or mathematics in low-performing districts and schools. At the onset of the project, 20 districts in Arkansas, Louisiana, New…

This report summarizes activities in the AISD state-funded Optional Extended Year program for the 2003-2004 school year.

The failure to consider factors that make a key contribution to violence and its prevention may create serious problems of construct validity for school violence surveys. Further, few studies have assessed the relative importance of variables contributing to perceptions of safety by examining correlations between survey items and overall feelings…

These proceedings contain the papers of the IADIS International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2013), October 22-24, 2013, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS), co-organized by The University of North Texas (UNT), sponsored by the…