At first glance, closing the achievement gap seems fairly straightforward. It is a difficult task to accomplish, but it does not seem an especially complex one to conceptualize. How educators look at achievement gaps will determine their success in reducing them. When designing interventions, the author suggests that educators need to remember the…

Critically analyzes Neville Bennett's book "Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress," which found that formal teaching styles are more closely associated with student achievement in "basic skills" than are informal styles. (IRT)

The Educational Research Service examines two meta-analyses of the class size/student achievement literature and concludes that they do not provide new evidence and that many of their conclusions are misleading or unjustified. (IRT)

An author of a meta-analysis of research on student achievement and class size answers criticism of his work. (IRT)

Advises readers to exercise caution when interpreting the results of so-called"classic studies," such as Hawthorne study; discusses results of study by Jaekyung Lee published in the January/February 2002 issue of "Educational Researcher" that found the achievement gap between white students and black and Hispanic students…

Ruth Stott violates canons of scholarly debate by attacking author's October 1992 "Kappan" article on world-class academic standards. Average class size predicted only 10% of variation in 13 year-olds' mean mathematics scores in 14 nations supplying reasonable comprehensive sampling frames for International Assessment of Academic…

Among the conclusions is that the plateau of school achievement today is at a level that compares favorably with available history. (Author/IRT)

In this personal narrative, the author notes that he has often said more or less in jest that when it comes to evaluating international studies, people lose their critical capacities and forget everything they ever learned in their courses in research methods and statistics. Results that would raise flags in any other endeavor receive no…

Richard Jaeger owes "Kappan" readers apology for violating ethics of his profession in deliberately propagating erroneous information. Jaeger rejects the positive correlation of large class size with high mathematics test scores in Korea and Taiwan and ignores Japan, another high-scoring nation with high class sizes. However, Jaeger…

In the two groups of teachers studied, there is clear agreement that characteristics perceived as important for the ideal child and the successful student are the same. (Author)

Discusses the results of a meta-analysis of the research that has been conducted on the effects of class size on achievement and then outlines a program that is going to field test hypotheses on the subject. (IRT)

The path to increasing certainty becomes not the single excellent study, which is nonetheless weak in one or more respects, but the convergence of findings from many studies, which are also weak, but in many different ways. The dissimilar or nonreplicated weaknesses leave the replicated finding more secure. (Author/IRT)

The shift to alterable variables (those that can be changed before or during the teaching and learning processes) enables researchers to move from an emphasis on prediction and classification to a concern for causality and the relations between means and ends in teaching and learning. (Author/IRT)