Principals (policy makers) have debated the progress in U.S. student performance for a half century or more. Informing these conversations, survey agents have administered seven million psychometrically linked tests in math and reading in 160 waves to national probability samples of selected cohorts born between 1954 and 2007. This study is the…

Background/Context: Regression discontinuity (RD) designs are used for policy and program evaluation where subjects' eligibility into a program or policy is determined by whether an assignment variable (i.e., running variable) exceeds a pre-defined cutoff. Under a standard RD design with a continuous assignment variable, the average treatment…

This annual report highlights information on school performance and improvement in Hawaii's public schools. The report profiles academic events, trends, and outcomes. Featured are tables and figures related to demographic, financial, and educational performance. Also, comparisons to other states with relevant characteristics similar to Hawaii are…

The article presents the results of a randomized experimental study of a writing curriculum for college developmental writing courses based on strategy instruction with self-regulation integrated with practices common in college composition. Students in a full semester course learned strategies for planning and revising based on rhetorical…

Grammatical and lexical cohesion are necessary conditions to guarantee a text's coherence (Halliday and Hasan 1976). Grammatical cohesion is classified into four types of relation: reference, conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis. This study aims to investigate the use of the cohesive device of reference in written discourse produced by…

At a time when voters are keenly focused on the cost of living, housing affordability has become a hot political issue in many parts of the country, including New York State. Policymakers, grappling with what they can do to make housing more affordable, are actively seeking to reform longstanding local exclusionary zoning laws, policies that…

Education systems across the globe have enacted national testing regimes to monitor and report student achievement progress as an outcome of teaching performance. This paper reports on an investigation of strategies that Principals of high achieving schools use to achieve school results, based on NAPLAN reports (the National Assessment Program in…

Private tutoring is not a new phenomenon for education in both developed and developing countries. However, English private tutoring (EPT) attracted a limited number of studies, although English is viewed as the key to success in non-English speaking countries like Cambodia. By observing EPT as a choice, this mixed-method study, using the…

Over the past 30 years, numerous policies have focused on closing the achievement gap in the United States. Despite this emphasis on mastery and proficiency, students continue to perform below expectations. We use standardized math test performance to explore whether schools have been able to eliminate the achievement gap across middle-level…

Academically engaging adolescents with learning difficulties continues to be a challenge for teachers and education authorities around the world. This paper reports on one part of a broader study to address the impasse present between research and practice in meeting the needs of adolescents with learning difficulties. Drawing on the mounting…

Parents, one of the primary stakeholders in their child's performance in tests, can play a vital role in assessment. As these high-stakes tests are likely to bring life-changing consequences to students' lives, most parents try their best to help their children to prepare for them. However, almost no research has explored the nature of parental…

This study uses high school transcript data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) High School Transcript Study (HSTS) to determine the validity of student-reported high school courses on the NAEP twelfth-grade student questionnaire. Given that the HSTS is not administered as part of every NAEP twelfth-grade assessment,…

This paper presents a single-country case study of the use of large scale assessment (LSA) data to generate actionable knowledge at school and system levels. Actionable knowledge is data-informed insight into school and system processes that can be used to direct corrective action. The analysis is framed from the perspective of the country's…

U.S. school districts differ dramatically in their socioeconomic and demographic characteristics (Reardon, Yun, & Eitle, 1999; Stroub & Richards, 2013), and districts have considerable influence over instructional and organizational practices that may affect academic achievement (Whitehurst, Chingos, & Gallaher, 2013). This paper…

Building on the rich tradition of 'teacher as researcher' in mathematics education, I describe a study undertaken whilst working as a mathematics specialist in an Australian primary school. The focus of the study was on examining whether explicitly teaching students test-taking strategies ('test-wiseness') improved their performance on a…