Improve students' writing skills and boost their assessment scores while adding arts education, creativity, and fun to your writing curriculum. With this vibrant resource, improving writing skills goes hand-in-hand with improving test scores. Students learn how to use acting and visualization as prewriting activities to help them connect writing…

A critical state-level indicator of progress in public education is student achievement annual performance and change over time. The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) has been very active in tracking and reporting on student achievement results and using state assessment scores and other data to analyze achievement trends. A central…

College students operating under related cooperative contingencies (students had to earn individual credit before being considered for group credit) showed more consistent individual and group improvement on exam performance than students operating under unrelated contingencies (individual credit and group credit were independently determined). A…

Since the 1996/97 school year, the state of North Carolina has awarded bonuses of up to $1,500 to teachers in schools that exhibit test score gains above certain thresholds. This article reviews the details of the bonus program, describes patterns of differences between schools that qualify for bonuses of differing amounts, and presents basic data…

The National Indian Education Study (NIES) is administered as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which was expanded to allow more in-depth reporting on the achievement and experiences of American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) students. It fulfills a mandate of Executive Order 13336 issued in 2004 calling for closer…

Accounting educators struggle with ways to incorporate the development of critical thinking and communication skills into the curriculum. Case analysis is one tool for developing these skills. We examine whether students' case analysis scores improve as a result of participation in peer grading and peer review. We find that students improve their…

This report presents the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) long-term trend assessments in reading and mathematics, which were most recently given in the 2007-2008 school year to students at ages 9, 13, and 17. Nationally representative samples of over 26,000 public and private school students were assessed in each…

A major challenge for researchers and educators has been to discern the effect of ICT use on student learning outcomes. This paper maps the achievements in Year 10 Science of two cohorts of students over two years where students in the first year studied in a traditional environment while students in the second took part in a blended or e-learning…

There are many students who could profit from increasing their scores by even 50 points. It can mean the difference between getting into a "reach" or a "safety" school. Thus, there are a large number of students who could benefit from a book like this. Most of the books on the market are geared toward the great number of…

A 26-step plan is offered to help raise students' standardized test scores. (MT)

An Illinois school district decided, on an experimental basis, to drop junior high schools and go back to a K-8 organization. In the first year of a three-year experiment, average student learning growth in all subjects was 11 months at the K-7 buildings compared to six months at the junior high school. (MLF)

Background: "Volume & Heaviness" was one of three Piagetian tests used in the CSMS survey in 1975/76. However unlike psychometric tests showing the Flynn effect--that is with students showing steady improvements year by year requiring tests to be restandardized--it appeared that the performance of Y7 students has recently been…

With decreasing enrollment, decreasing funding for public school education, changes in family and societal needs, and the mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act, policymakers and school leaders are wrestling with reforms to the school calendar and instructional time spent in the classroom, with the goal of increasing student achievement.…

The Improving Literacy through School Libraries (LSL) program was established under Title I, Part B, Subpart 4 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). The purpose of the program is to improve the literacy skills and academic achievement of students by providing them with increased…

The issue of lower than expected mathematics achievement is a concern to education leaders and policymakers at all levels of the U.S. PK-12 education system. The purpose of this quantitative, quasi-experimental study was to determine if there was a measurable difference in achievement on the mathematics section of the state test for students (n =…