Automatic assessment of the quality of classroom discourse can have a transformative effect on research and practice on improving teaching effectiveness. We improve on a previous automated method to measure teacher authentic questions -- open-ended questions without pre-scripted responses that predict student achievement growth -- using classroom…

This study examines teachers' initial conceptions of an integrated STEM-PBL approach and their perceptions of what facilitates or hinders implementation in their schools. This study took place within the first year of a three-year STEM Professional Development (PD) program for middle school math, science and English language arts teachers. The two…

The purpose of this report is to summarize the activities of the standard-setting meeting for the New York State Alternate Assessment (NYSAA) in English Language Arts (ELA) and mathematics (Grades 3-8 and High School), science (Grades 4, 8, and High School), and social studies (High School). The NYSAA standard-setting meeting was held on June 11…

This paper notes that, when teachers assign the writing of research reports without showing children how to write such reports, they may actually encourage children to plagiarize. It then outlines a method used to teach seventh graders how to write short "controlled reports." Working as a group, the students learn how to pose research questions,…

Satire appears to be one of the least attractive forms of humorous literature because many readers feel it encompasses negative and ill-mannered comic devices. By virtue of the fact that satire is not considered polite literature, it rarely makes its way into the planned literary curricula until students enter high school English courses. In this…

Working in cooperation with reading specialists, English teachers designed a program to meet the needs of a class of seventh graders with reading disabilities. The reading specialist role was expanded from that of small consultant to include actual classroom instructor. The teaching of literature and reading skills was facilitated through the…

The first section of this paper discusses the sentence combining approach to teaching writing and includes illustrations of sentence combining problems. The second section describes a program in which the sentence combining approach was used with low ability seventh graders in an inner-city junior high school. Among the benefits of the program…