In recent years, there has been increasing awareness on the benefits of social-emotional competencies (SEC) on Israeli students. A self-report SEL measure tailored to the Israeli context, however, has yet to be developed. This research aims to validate the Social-Emotional Questionnaire for Grades 4-6 (SEQ [G4-6]), a new self-report questionnaire…

It was observed in this research how endurance status of fluent readers and poor readers changed as the text became longer. 40 students of the primary school 4th-grade, 20 were fluent readers and other 20 were poor readers, participated in the research. A narrative text was utilised in the data collection process. Students' oral readings were…

Aim of this study is to determine the effect of narrative and informative text types on Reading Comprehension levels of Primary Education 4th and 5th grade students. Application was fulfilled in 2011-2012 academic year with 134 students in a primary education school in Province Kirsehir. Reading comprehension tests prepared according to text types…

Why has large-scale standardised testing attracted such a bad press? Why has pedagogic benefit to be derived from test results been downplayed? The paper investigates this question by first surveying the pros and cons of testing in the literature, and goes on to examine educators' responses to standardised, large-scale tests in a sample of low…

Multiple-choice (MC) reading comprehension test items comprise three components: text passage, questions about the text, and MC answers. The construct validity of this format has been repeatedly criticized. In three between-subjects experiments, fourth graders (N[subscript 1] = 230, N[subscript 2] = 340, N[subscript 3] = 194) worked on three…

PIRLS is an international assessment of reading comprehension at the fourth grade that has been conducted every five years since 2001. In 2011, nationally representative samples of students in 49 countries participated in PIRLS and prePIRLS. Forty-five countries assessed fourth grade students, and some countries participated in one or more of the…

Many articles and reports have reviewed, researched, and commented on international assessments from the perspective of exploring what is relevant for the United States' education systems. Researchers make claims about whether the top-performing systems have transferable practices or policies that could be applied to the United States. However,…

This study examines the effects of public preschool expenditures on the math and science scores of 4th graders, holding constant child, family, and school characteristics, other relevant social expenditures, and country and year effects, in 7 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries--Australia, Japan, the…

The present study tested the assumption of a positive and linear relation between years of schooling and school learning in the Philippine setting. It replicated a 1976 study that had cast doubt on this assumption in the Philippine public educational system. It tested three competing hypotheses for that finding: common sense, the 1976 arrested…