Accreditation agencies and organizations calling for higher academic standards in the teaching profession have called for increasing minimum grade point averages and scores on standardized tests. However, it's not clear that these requirements actually improve teaching. Lisa Borden-King, Warren Gamas, Kathy Hintz, and Chelsie Hultz researched…

To expand and improve evidence of grading practices, we seized an opportunity presented by the implementation of standards-based grading practices at 11 high schools in Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, Ky. These high-needs schools faced substantial sanctions outlined by recently revised federal and state policies unless they made…

In Project STAR, 11,571 students in Tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to different classrooms in their schools from kindergarten to 3rd grade. Researchers learned that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with such outcomes as earnings at age 27, college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. Students who…

This September 2010 article is a reprint of the original October 1998 article. Few reform initiatives focus on what goes on in the "black box" of the classroom, on what really happens in the interaction between teachers and students. This article is about the inside of the black box. The authors focus on one aspect of teaching: formative…

For some time, the author and his colleagues at the Kettering Foundation have been concerned that the public schools are losing their connection to a democratic public and that citizens are losing their sense of ownership and responsibility for these schools. Lately, they have also begun to worry that the connection between professional educators…

Compares outcomes of the 1970 and 1977 weighted standardization samples for the subtests of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. On the whole, achievement appears to be consistent between tests for the fourth- and eighth-grade students and no one basic skill shows marked gains or losses. (Author/IRT)

Test scores have fallen because play is essential for childrens' cognitive development and this generation of children has played less than any other. (Author/IRT)

Howard Fuller misinterpreted the author's remarks regarding feasibility of expanding the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. Since parochial schools were not included in the original math achievement study, results cannot be generalized to a broader voucher program. Fuller also distorted the 4th-year math effect found by other researchers. (MLH)

Rebuts articles asserting that the steep decline in school test scores has been stopped. (IRT)

Given that competition can motivate students to perform better on high-stakes tests, this article ponders what might be done to help students take the relatively low-stakes National Assessment of Educational Progress tests more seriously. So far, offering intrinsic and extrinsic rewards has yielded mixed or questionable results. (MLH)

Because the Reagan and Bush administrations accentuated the negative about American schools, there was little mention of U.S. students' average performance on the geography part of the 1992 Second International Assessment of Educational Progress. On the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (1994), U.S. eighth graders finished slightly…

An ETS adult-literacy study, ignored by the media, showed that teachers' prose, document, and quantitative literacy was higher than that of most other professionals. Administrators scored lower than teachers in all three literacies. Meanwhile, a highly publicized Home School Legal Defense study glorified privileged students' predictable test…

Defends the National Association of Secondary School Principals volume "Guidelines for Improving SAT Scores" against criticism offered in the immediately preceding article. (IRT)

In agreeing with the College Entrance Examination Board finding that social disruptions during the 1960s were one cause for declining test scores, the author recounts some disruptions that she faced in her classroom. (IRT)

Earnest Sternglass discusses the evidence he has discovered relating declining scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test to atmospheric radiation in the 1950s. (IRT)