The growth of a STEM-focused economy has intensified the focus on developing kindergarten through grade 12 (K-12) students' STEM competencies and on the STEM practices of K-12 STEM teachers. The present study utilised secondary analysis of nationally-representative STEM teacher survey data to examine the ways in which middle grades teachers'…

Research suggests that current teachers' writing instruction does not prepare students for the demands of college and career writing, a problem that has persisted for decades. The purpose of this survey study of third- and fifth-grade teachers (N=159) across the U.S. was 1) to determine changes in teachers' frequency teaching writing using a set…

Latent class analysis (LCA) is a statistical method used to group individuals (cases, units) into classes (categories) of an unobserved (latent) variable on the basis of the responses made on a set of nominal, ordinal, or continuous observed variables. In this article, we introduce LCA in order to demonstrate its usefulness to early adolescence…

Worldwide private tutoring is documented extensively, but its impact is unclear. I estimate the impact of tutoring on performance to assess the degree to which tutoring is a vehicle of educational stratification in Sri Lanka. I find that on average, five months of tutoring has no impact on Year 5 students' exam scores. I produce suggestive…

In 2012 a new education monitoring system called the National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA) began collecting information about the achievement of Year 4 and Year 8 students enrolled in English-medium schools. Over the last 5 years it has had contact with over 20,000 students from more than 1,000 schools. This Assessment News…

Concerns regarding the social-behavioral maladjustment of U.S. youth have spurred efforts among educators and policymakers to identify and remedy educational contexts that exacerbate children's anxiety, depression, aggression, and misconduct. However, investigations of the influence of collective classroom student characteristics on individuals'…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to investigate the influences of calendar year, year level, gender and language background other than English (LBOTE) on student achievement in literacy and numeracy relative to class size. Design/methodology/approach: Data for this study were collected over five years (2008-2012) as test results from the…

How many students repeat a grade each year? How do retention rates vary across states and over time? Despite extensive research on the predictors and consequences of grade retention, there is no systematic way to quantify state-level retention rates; even national estimates rely on imperfect proxy measures. We present a conceptually simple…

In this paper we investigate the relationship between social capital and cheating behaviour in standardized tests. Given the low-stakes nature of these tests, we interpret the widespread presence of cheating as a signal of low trust towards central education authorities and as lack of respect for the rule of law. We find that cheating is…

Private tutoring (PT) is becoming a worldwide phenomenon. In Israel too, about a third of elementary school students participate in PT. Based on sociological and school quality considerations, we examined school characteristics that are associated with PT intensity at school. The data encompassed a random state wide sample of 389 Israeli…

In 2008, Mongolia took part in One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. Since that time, over 10,000 students in grades 2-5 in 43 primary education schools are using XO computers. This paper presents the findings of a study conducted in 2012 to evaluate the impact of the OLPC initiatives on students' literacy and math skills. This study covered 14…

Beginning in 2007, the Literacy Program at the Right Age (Pacto pela Alfabetização na Idade Certa [PAIC]) in Brazil's Ceará state required municipal schools to implement a tiered, whole-school early-grade literacy intervention. This intervention was complemented by other policies to help municipalities improve student achievement. The present…

Background: Children's early skills are essential for their later success in school. Recent evidence highlights the importance of early mathematics, relative to reading and socioemotional skills, for elementary school achievement. Key advocacy groups for both early childhood and mathematics education have issued position statements on the…

This study, a replication and extension of work by Norris (2004), examined sight-reading requirements at middle and high school large-group band festivals across the United States. As in the earlier investigation, answers to the following questions were solicited from all 50 states: (1) Are there ratings-based large-group band festivals? (2) Is…

This paper examines primary school-aged children's lived experiences of the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests. NAPLAN emulates the neoliberal accountability agendas of English and US education systems, with results published on the My School website. Research on the impact of NAPLAN to date has focused predominantly…