Secondary course assignment substantially determines a teacher's day-to-day work life, incentivizing them to realize their personal desires, which prior work shows tend to be working with more advanced students. Teachers have varying abilities to enact these desires, potentially due to their political capital, which is largely influenced by…

This quantitative study is primarily intended to examine whether district level performance results from Grade 8 ELA state assessments can help to predict future passing rates on AP exams. The participants for the study are all 218 K-12 school districts in New Jersey, all of which generated results across score levels and passing rates for PARCC…

As college-bound high school seniors know, the ACT examination is possibly the single most important assessment students take during their academic careers. ACT scores can determine college entrance, scholarship dollars, and whether students will be placed in remedial courses. Parents pay large sums of money to prepare their children for this…

The problem was the impacts of the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum on Chinese teachers' self-efficacy and student-centered learning practices were unknown. The purpose of this causal-comparative study was to determine the impacts of the International Baccalaureate curriculum on Chinese teachers' reports of self-efficacy and…

In a hypercompetitive academic culture propelled by acceptance into the nation's prestigious colleges and universities, there has been a growing number of secondary students who are fixated on pursuing advanced coursework. This phenomenon of students beginning a sequence of advanced mathematics courses at the middle school level so they can take…