The goal of Smithsonian Science for North and South Carolina Classrooms was to provide teachers with ongoing, differentiated professional development and research-based curricular materials to improve elementary student achievement in science, mathematics, and reading. This work used an inquiry-based science curriculum, Smithsonian Science for the…

Federal and state legislations continue to mandate high-stakes testing for American students. Consequences of high-stakes testing include but are not limited to, low teacher efficacy, narrow teaching strategies, lack of student motivation, and the feeling of insecurity in classrooms by the students. The purpose of this study was to gain a deeper…

This study aims to examine the performance of students who completed the North Carolina Math 1 EOC assessment. The provided test scores are for students in middle school and high school who identify as Asian, Black, Latinx, and White, and are specifically for the North Carolina Math 1 EOC assessment. This applied research study focuses on Math 1…

Measuring educational opportunity is a topic of interest to policymakers and education stakeholders alike. Standardized assessments of student achievement are commonly used to measure educational opportunity in North Carolina and across the nation. This research brief examines two measures of educational opportunity in North Carolina public school…

We examined developmental trajectories of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms, standardized achievement, and school performance for adolescents with and without ADHD who did and did not enroll in postsecondary education (PSE; N = 749; 79% boys; 63% White, 17% non-Hispanic Black, 10% Hispanic, and 10% other ethnicities). In a…

Grade inflation is pervasive in American high schools. Is rampant grade inflation cause for concern? How teachers' grading standards affect student success is an empirical question--one that the author addresses in this article in a new study of roughly 350,000 North Carolina students taking Algebra I between 2006 and 2016. The author first…

Researchers examined the relationship between superintendent longevity and district variables on standardized test scores for students in North Carolina. The authors used hierarchical multiple regression to understand if superintendent-specific variables explained variance in student performance over and above district-based variables documented…

As the American economy has moved from a manufacturing emphasis to the digital age, its students have been found to be lacking academic skills necessary to compete in the current global job market. Education analysts have proposed various remedies to this, including the types of educational reforms outlined in documents such as "A Nation at…

There are large gaps in reading skills by family income among school-aged children in the United States. Correlational evidence suggests that reading skills are strongly related to the amount of reading students do outside of school. Experimental evidence testing whether this relationship is causal is lacking. We report the results from a…

With current education reforms, teachers feel pressure to educate students who can successfully perform on standardized tests. To help prepare students, many teachers access test item banks that contain questions similar to those on the standardized tests. A census study investigated the extent North Carolina agriculture education teachers used…

The North Carolina Opportunity Scholarship Program is a private school voucher program that provides state-funded vouchers worth up to $4,200 to eligible students entering kindergarten through 12th grade. Because the public and private school sectors administer different assessments, we recruited approximately 700 students to take a common,…

Public Impact's "Opportunity Culture" (OC) initiative provides a suite of models aimed at extending the reach of highly effective teachers and has partnered with school districts to implement these interventions in schools. Using administrative data from three partner school districts that collectively include 44 OC schools, we estimate…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether a significant difference exists in academic achievement between all students and economically disadvantaged students when compared by socioeconomic levels in the North Carolina middle grades learner (as measured by reading and mathematics standardized tests). It also sought to determine whether…

Community colleges across the United States are adopting multiple measures policies that place students into college-level or developmental coursework based on more than one indicator of student ability. Historically, community colleges relied on high-stakes tests for student placement but recent studies have exposed these as unreliable indicators…

A Vygotskian approach to assessment is proposed by invoking the distinction between the development of lower and higher psychological functions. Higher psychological functions are specifically human and develop with the use of cultural tools via mediation. Accordingly, a distinction is made between tests that are based on association, which have…