The Massachusetts Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) is designed to improve curriculum and instruction in the public schools. The MEAP tests all students in grades 4, 8, and 12 in major curriculum areas biennially. The test is not designed to yield scores for individual students. This document describes the content of the assessment instruments…

The Teachers Achieving Success with Kids (TASK) mentorship program was designed to improve the attendance, discipline, academic achievement and attitudes of at-risk students attending an urban middle school. In order to develop positive relationships, 25 teacher-student pairs met each day away from the classroom setting and engaged in one hour…

This guide begins with a series of questions and answers that introduce Pennsylvania's Educational Quality Assessment (EQA) Inventory as a 188- to 190-item multiple-choice test for grades 5, 8, and 11. Items are selected from a 400-item bank using matrix sampling procedures. Test results are analyzed at the school level; no individual student…

This paper addresses the problem that gender imbalance in curriculum and instruction contributes to sexism, stereotyping, and bias in schools. The study was conducted in a reading classroom in a grade 6-8 middle school of 970 students in a suburban area of the northeast United States. The program focused on inservice workshops and integration of…

The effectiveness of teaching academic courses such as mathematics and science in a foreign language has been investigated by several international studies in the literature. Even though the studies conducted have brought up contradictory results, most of them reveal that learning academic courses through a foreign language medium may pose…

The Illinois Inventory of Educational Progress (IIEP) Test Comfort Scale was administered and test results were studied in terms of student achievement and correlates of achievement. Using the revised, seven-item scale, it was determined that: in grade 4, there was no main significant effect for sex or ethnic differences, although Orientals and…

This action research project sought to develop students' critical thinking skills by implementing a variety of instructional strategies. Targeted for this study were students in one early childhood special education program, one kindergarten class, and one eighth grade science class. The deficit in critical thinking and problem-solving skills was…

Alum Rock Elementary Union School District had an interest in a middle school program being introduced by Teachers' Curriculum Institute (TCI) called "History Alive!" Supplementary materials from TCI were already in use in many of the classrooms and several of the district administrators were interested in whether the full middle school…

This study examined the personal value systems of 98 at-risk seventh- and eighth-grade students in a public middle school in southwest Baltimore County, Maryland. The study sought to determine differences in the value orientations, or personal beliefs and attitudes, of: (1) males and females; (2) minority and nonminority students; and (3) Asian…

This manual describes the Mathematics Assessment Questionnaire (MAQ) and its development, provides relevant background from the research literature, describes approaches to the reporting and uses of the MAQ (including its use in instructional planning), and presents sample responses from students and classes. The MAQ provides teachers and students…

Ten frequently used eighth grade U.S. history textbooks were examined to determine the extent to which they reflected the pluralistic nature of the United States, promoted the concept of global interdependence, and were educationally sound. This volume includes checklists completed by 16 individual reviewers. For each completed checklist, specific…

A five-point school subjects attitude scale, based on the semantic differential technique, was developed after two rounds of factor analysis; it contained 24 bipolar adjectives, each representing one of three factors: evaluation, usefulness, and difficulty. The scale was administered to Alberta (Canada) students in grades 5 and 8, who were…

This action research project implemented and evaluated an intervention for increasing student engagement in learning to improve academic success. The targeted population consisted of students in four separate schools: pre-kindergarten and eighth graders in a large metropolitan area and fifth and eighth graders in a rural community. The lack of…

In the spring of 1989, over 2,000 pairs of fourth- and eighth-grade students were assessed on their ability to apply mathematical and scientific concepts. The tests (administered in alternate years during the written assessments of the Massachusetts Educational Assessment Program) required students to apply what they knew about mathematics and…

The use of a generative and evaluative computerized prompting framework to improve the teaching of writing skills was studied with 164 children in grades 6, 7, and 8 with high or low writing skills, who were randomly assigned to control or treatment groups. The treatment group received computer prompts, think sheet scaffolds, and expert modeling…