It is considered important for students to participate in scientific practices to develop a deeper understanding of scientific ideas. Supporting students, however, in knowing and understanding the natural world in connection with generating and evaluating scientific evidence and explanations is not easy. In addition, writing in science can help…

We investigated the behavioral and brain responses (ERPs) of bilingual word recognition to three fundamental psycholinguistic factors, frequency, morphology, and lexicality, in early bilinguals vs. monolinguals. Earlier behavioral studies have reported larger frequency effects in bilinguals' nondominant vs. dominant language and in some studies…

High school biology teachers face many challenges as they teach evolution. State standards for evolution may provide support for sound evolution instruction. This study attempts to build upon previous work by investigating teachers' views of evolution standards and their evolution practices in a state where evolution standards have been…

The present study investigated interpretation bias and reduced evidence for danger (RED) bias in 49 children with social phobia and 49 nonsocially anxious children between the ages of 8 and 14 years, using an ambiguous stories task. A posttreatment and follow-up measure was included for 26 of the socially phobic children to examine whether there…

Literature exploring the experiences of gifted individuals has often focused on asynchronous development, particularly during childhood and adolescence. Also discussed in the literature are the unique social, emotional, and behavioral characteristics associated with giftedness. However, there is still an unclear picture concerning the implications…

The equal ability distribution assumption associated with the equivalent groups equating design was investigated in the context of a selection test for admission to higher education. The purpose was to assess the consequences for the test-takers in terms of receiving improperly high or low scores compared to their peers, and to find strong…

Central to the debate over school choice has been the question of how public schools respond to market-based competition. Many choice advocates suggest that competition can spur public schools to become more effective and efficient, but the evidence regarding the effect of competition from charters is comparably sparse and mixed. This article…

The purpose of this study was to examine an activity-based intervention, dialogic reading with embedded explicit phonological awareness strategies, applied as a preventive approach by parents in their home settings located within a culturally and ethnically diverse urban region. This study investigated the effects of training parents to employ a…

One of the educational reform methods sanctioned under No Child Left Behind legislation is the development of charter schools (King, 2007). While many studies have focused on comparing the student academic achievement rates of charter schools to traditional public schools, little empirical research exists comparing student academic achievement…

This paper reports on the results of a meta-analysis of first year pre-service teachers' investigations of two transcripts of teacher/student talk. The first is set in the home environment and the second in the classroom. Working with specific tools of analysis and knowledge of the role of talk in literate, cultural and social practices they…

When test forms are administered to examinee groups that differ in proficiency, equating procedures are used to disentangle group differences from form differences. This dissertation investigates the extent to which equating results are population invariant, the impact of group differences on equating results, the impact of group differences on…

Colleges and universities have embraced the importance of community engagement, not only as a tool for student development but also, as a responsibility of the institution to address societal needs and problems. Research is lacking, however, on how institutions with varying missions, histories and cultures perceive their role in the community,…

We examine the respective roles of substantive understanding (i.e., understanding of factual knowledge, concepts, laws and theories) and procedural understanding (an understanding of ideas about evidence; concepts such as reliability and validity, measurement and calibration, data collection, measurement error, the ability to interpret evidence…

Arts Council England (ACE) commissioned NFER to undertake the national evaluation of the In Harmony social and music education programme 2012-2015. In Harmony is funded by the Department for Education (DfE) and ACE, and is currently being piloted in six areas. The evaluation is investigating the range and extent of impacts on children, families,…

When linguistic input provides inconsistent evidence for grammatical structures, children tend to regularize. For example, children learning languages from parents who are imperfect users of the language regularize their parents' inconsistent usages (Singleton & Newport, 2004). Previous studies (Hudson Kam & Newport, 2005, 2009) have examined this…