This instrumental case study examines how secondary biology teachers in a professional learning community (PLC) negotiated the meaning of the "Next Generation Science Standards" ("NGSS") in a year-long process of redesigning their curriculum. The PLC consisted of six biology teachers, five females and one male, who co-planned…

Description: Effective with the 2014/15 school year, Mississippi adopted new academic standards and courses aligned to these new standards. The new courses included both a subject-specific mathematics sequence (that is, algebra I, geometry, and algebra II) as well as an integrated mathematics sequence (that is, integrated I, integrated II, and…

Each year, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) offers a summer education program designed to assist students with a variety of instructional needs. Centrally coordinated summer school programs in 2017 included accelerated instruction for State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) and STAAR End-of-Course (EOC) re-testers;…

Each year, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) offers a summer education program designed to assist students with a variety of instructional needs. Centrally coordinated summer school programs in 2018 included accelerated instruction for State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) and STAAR End-of-Course (EOC) re-testers;…

This is a case study in which the Character Development and Leadership Program replaced an alternative high school's traditional English language offerings. A triangulated case study used student records, field notes, and interviews of stakeholders to compare the academic year prior to this substitution and the 2 academic years following it. All 3…

We derived an index of high school academic rigor by optimizing the prediction of first-year college GPA based on high school courses taken, grades, and indicators of advanced coursework. Using a large data set (n~108,000) and nominal parameterization of high school course outcomes, the high school academic rigor (HSAR) index capitalizes on…

Each year, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) offers a summer education program designed to assist students with a variety of instructional needs. The 2016 summer education program allowed students the opportunity to repeat required courses needed for promotion, to get ahead by taking required courses before the next school year, or to…

This article provides an initial comparison of the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics and the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics by examining the fundamental notion of slope. Each set of standards is analyzed using eleven previously identified conceptualizations of slope. Both sets of standards emphasize Functional Property,…

The Berge et al. article in this volume presents the functional construct of writing that underlies summative and formative assessment of writing as a key competency in Norway. A functional construct implies that specific acts of writing and their purposes constrain what is a relevant selection among the semiotic resources that writing generally…

The issue of academic integrity in cheating on exams and plagiarising in writing is not a new one. All schools need to address this problem and some more than others. In the L2 context, the issues become more complex as non-native students need to adhere to the "culture of learning" of a Western model of academic integrity if they are to…

The aim of this thesis is to investigate and present the status of student synthesis with color coded formula writing for grade level six through twelve, and to make recommendations for educators to teach writing structure through a color coded formula system in order to increase classroom engagement and lower students' affect. The thesis first…

Each year, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) offers a summer education program designed to assist students with a variety of instructional needs. The 2015 summer education program allowed students the opportunity to repeat required courses needed for promotion, to get ahead by taking required courses before the next school year, or to…

This paper presents a grade 10 mathematics teacher's in-depth description of the process she uses to determine the final grade for the report card within a standards-based context. Her case was part of a three-year comparative study of grading practices of teachers from two Canadian provinces that differ in their level of standardization of…

The authors examine whether standards based accountability reforms of the past two decades have closed the achievement gap among public and private high school students. They analyzed data from the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) to examine sector differences in high school achievement in the era of standards based reforms. The authors found…

The "No Child Left Behind" legislation requires states to classify schools based on students meeting the state's academic standards. A combination of factors, including scores on state specific tests and nationally normed tests, can result in a school being awarded a low classification or a high classification. In the authors' state,…