This quantitative causal comparative study looked to see if there was a relationship between childhood obesity and student achievement. Because of the many conflicting results in the research available, it was not known if there was a relationship between childhood obesity and student achievement among inner-city middle school students in a school…

This study examined differences in the academic performance of students in grades 6, 7, 8, 9, and 11 in Seventh-day Adventist schools in the United States and Bermuda based on their level of involvement in school music organizations--band or choir--and school sports--varsity or intramural--as measured by standardized achievement and ability tests.…

The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of poverty on the achievement of African American male high school students attending the same large Midwest urban school district. Cumulative grade point average (GPA) at the tenth grade level were compared to the level of poverty provided through census data of African American male tenth…

Writing assessments have taken two primary forms in the past two decades: direct and indirect. Irrespective of type, either form needs to be anchored to making decisions in the classroom and predicting performance on high-stakes tests, particularly in a high-stakes environment with serious consequences. In this study, 11th-grade students were…

Today's students are disengaged, disenfranchised, and dropping out in record numbers. If this trend continues, educators and academic institutions everywhere are in jeopardy of exacerbating the wide chasm that separates students from learning. This was a quasi-experimental, causal-comparative, action-research study. The researcher implemented…

When students do not score well on standardized tests, their school can suffer. In an attempt to improve standardized test scores, a district placed students into a program called Seminar to help them work on weak areas of content through personalized instruction. The purpose of this project study was to assess if the Seminar program had a…

Despite the availability of and pressures to incorporate educational technology into secondary curriculum, schools have not shown that technology is being adequately used by educators or that students in fact know how to use them. In particular, many teachers are not using technology such as graphing calculators as an instructional mathematics…

Reading performance among Grade 11 students has been low in the local school district under study. Schools within the boundaries of that setting have implemented research-based interventions to curb this problem of poor reading performance. A quasi-experimental, causal-comparative study was conducted to investigate the effect of Marzano's…

This dissertation addresses two research questions: 1. Do states misrepresent their progress on their own state assessments? 2. If states do distort their progress, are their predictors to suggest why this distortion occurs? The first research question requires that distortion be defined. For the purposes of this dissertation I calculated the…

The focus of the study, a replicative meta-analysis, was to provide educators and policymakers with an analysis of extant data collected from current research, 1996 to pre-"Race to the Top" (RttP) and "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" of 2009 (ARRA), concerning the question of whether or not a positive or negative effect…

This dissertation examines teaching with the interactive whiteboard and its impact on student achievement outcomes for grade 5 students of economic disadvantage. It is a quantitative retrospective posttest only comparison group study. State assessment scores of low SES students at two grade 5 centers were compared. The scores that were compared…

The guiding question for this qualitative study centered on what it means to be a principal in a high school that has been put on notice as a failure and labeled "Program Improvement" (PI). The evidence shed light on the unique challenges, role expectations, and varying social conditions faced by two female principals as they managed…

This study investigated the relationship between academic achievement scores for Hispanic and all students within Tennessee. The study compared the measurement of achievement scores by the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) on standardized Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) evaluations for 5th-grade students and Gateway exams…

Living in an era of test-based accountability systems, how do we hold accountability tests accountable? Many accountability decisions made today are based on the assumption that test scores successfully reflect the effect of instruction. However, only instructionally sensitive assessments, not the instructionally insensitive ones, reflect the…

There has been much debate regarding the impact of state-mandated assessment in schools. Most of the literature on this topic has been gathered from studies focused on teachers' perceptions (Hungerford, 2004). The effects, typically perceived to be negative, indicate reduced quality of teaching and learning in schools. The purpose of this study…