High-stakes testing is changing what it means to be a "good teacher" in the contemporary school. This paper uses Deleuze and Guattari's ideas on the control society and dividuation in the context of National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) testing in Australia to suggest that the database generates new…

This article examined the performance of 57 students with learning disabilities (LD) from four middle schools. Students were followed over the course of a school year in their inclusive science classrooms as they alternated between the use of traditional curricular materials for some units of study and materials that were supplemented with video…

Data from competence tests usually show a number of missing responses on test items due to both omitted and not-reached items. Different approaches for dealing with missing responses exist, and there are no clear guidelines on which of those to use. While classical approaches rely on an ignorable missing data mechanism, the most recently developed…

Effective writing requires mastering grammar. For journalists, this mastery is critical because research shows poor grammar erodes media credibility. College writing instructors say students do not understand basic grammar concepts, and greater numbers of students are enrolling in remedial writing classes. This quasi-experimental mixed methods…

A framework is introduced for considering dimensionality assessment procedures for multidimensional item response models. The framework characterizes procedures in terms of their confirmatory or exploratory approach, parametric or nonparametric assumptions, and applicability to dichotomous, polytomous, and missing data. Popular and emerging…

More than 40 states plan to assess student performance with new tests tied to the Common Core State Standards. In summer 2013, results from Common Core-aligned tests in New York showed a steep decline in outcomes. Common Core advocates hailed the scores as an honest accounting of school and student performance, while others worried that they…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that many US students are deficient in core knowledge in geography, civics and current events. In this paper, a professor of social studies methods describes an action research project developed to assess and improve teacher candidates' knowledge in these areas. The article explains how…

Recent years have seen an increased focus on school accountability in Ireland and calls for greater use to be made of student achievement data for monitoring student outcomes. In this paper, it is argued that existing data-sets in Ireland offer limited potential for the value-added modelling approaches used for accountability purposes in many…

The authors explored teachers' and principals' perceptions of the feedback report from the National Tests in Trinidad and Tobago and the extent to which they used the report in making curricular decisions to impact student learning. The sample comprised 133 primary school teachers (79 from low-performing and 54 from high-performing…

Every country--and even every community--has populations of students who severely underperform relative to other groups and to their own potential. These performance differences are generally called achievement gaps, and they tend to focus on gaps at basic levels of academic proficiency. But such gaps also exist among the highest levels of…

Historically, strong teacher unions have been successful at gaining benefits and security for their members, but they have been put on the defensive by recent proposals for education reform. Charter schools are one such reform that could threaten unions, but there is wide variety in the content of state charter school laws. Using state-level data…

A goal of geography education is fostering geographic literacy for all and building significant expertise for some. How much time and practice do students need to become literate or expert in geography? There is not an answer to this question. Using two concepts from cognitive psychology--the ideas of ten thousand hours and deliberate…

Despite the potential of differentiated curricula to enhance learning, limited research exists that documents their impact on Grade 3 students of all ability levels. To determine if there was a difference in achievement between students involved in 16 weeks of predifferentiated, enriched mathematics curricula and students using their…

Using eight waves of longitudinal data on a statewide kindergarten cohort of English learners (ELs), I examined ELs' tenure in language-learning programs and their academic performance following reclassification as fluent English proficient. I employed discrete-time survival analysis to estimate the average time to and grade of…

The purpose of the study was to measure students' reported test-taking effort and the relationship between reported effort and performance on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) Advanced mathematics test. This was done in three countries participating in TIMSS Advanced 2008 (Sweden, Norway, and Slovenia), and the…