Background: While journalists claim social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been central to the growth of the opt-out movement, there is a lack of empirical research that examines its use by participants. We address this gap by highlighting findings related to the usage of social media by opt-out participants in Ohio. Purpose: This…

In the United States, national and state standardized assessments have become a metric for measuring student learning and high-quality learning environments. As the COVID19 pandemic offered a multitude of learning modalities (e.g., hybrid, socially distanced face-to-face instruction, virtual environment), it becomes critical to examine how this…

Purpose: This study was designed to assess the utility of a tool for automated analysis of rare vocabulary use in the spoken narratives of a group of school-age children from low-income communities. Method: We evaluated personal and fictional narratives from 76 school-age children from low-income communities (M[subscript age] = 9;3…

The purpose of the study is to understand secondary science teachers' self-efficacy beliefs and implementation of inquiry to provide information for the improvement of science education in a Midwestern U.S. state that has not yet adopted NGSS. An explanatory sequential mixed methods design was selected to capture both a broad perspective of…

This review critiques the highly-praised and influential 2001 study, "Getting Tough? The Impact of High School Graduation Exams," which concluded that "minimum competency," or high school "graduation exams," had no effect on student achievement. The review compares the test classifications of "Getting…

Construct-irrelevant cognitive complexity of some items in the statewide grade-level assessments may impose performance barriers for students with disabilities who are ineligible for alternate assessments based on alternate achievement standards. This has spurred research into whether items can be modified to reduce complexity without affecting…

This study reports findings from studies examining potential read-aloud accommodations on standardized reading comprehension assessments for students with decoding difficulties. Three types of accommodations were evaluated: question stems and answer options read aloud; question stems, answer options, and proper nouns read aloud; and full…

This study explores the impact of one-to-one computing on student achievement in Ohio high schools as measured by performance on the Ohio Graduation Test (OGT). The sample included 24 treatment schools that were individually paired with a similar control school. An interrupted time series methodology was deployed to examine OGT data over a period…

In this work we examined the content of approximately 950 mathematics questions used in measuring achievement among 4th, 5th and 6th graders in the US in an attempt to determine how the current standardized examinations, which were developed to reflect new national curricular mandates, compared to the old measures used for the same purpose. Using…

Millions of adults in the United States lack the necessary literacy skills for most living wage jobs. For students from adult learning classes, we used a lexical decision task to measure their knowledge of words and we used a decision-making model (Ratcliff's, 1978, diffusion model) to abstract the mechanisms underlying their performance from…

Students hold many misconceptions as they transition from arithmetic to algebraic thinking, and these misconceptions can hinder their performance and learning in the subject. To identify the errors in Algebra I which are most persistent and pernicious in terms of predicting student difficulty on standardized test items, the present study assessed…

This study indicates that the state-mandated high-stakes social studies assessments in four states do not require students to demonstrate that they have met the cognitive demands articulated in the state-mandated learning standards. Further, the assessments do not allow students to demonstrate the critical thinking skills required by the…

The 2012 presidential election and many state and local races are only a few weeks away, but schools are not doing much to promote student interest in the elections or provide civic education more broadly, new research suggests. A report last week from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), at Tufts…

Board of education membership changes that are numerous or frequent appear to cause some level of disruption to the educational process in a school district. A board of education that is changing can be vulnerable to special interest groups. The purpose of this study is to determine the interrelationships among the following five variables and…

Claims are often made about the impact of high school athletics on academic achievement without reference to empirical research on the issue. In this paper we empirically examine the relationship between the extent to which high schools have winning sports teams, offer a variety of sports options, and facilitate student participation in athletics…