This study examined the effects of manipulating on expectancy in same-sex, same-age dyads of unacquainted 7- to 12-year olds. Students completed questionnaires about themselves and their partners, with one partner having received an expectancy about the other's ability. Expectancy had a significant effect on both partners. Gender had negligible…

Most student performance studies using the production function or input-output approach do not consider student attendance as an independent variable. Data from Baltimore County public elementary schools indicate that student attendance positively and consistently correlates to standardized achievement test performance. Student socioeconomic…

This study investigated the relationship between teacher professionalism and educational process and outcomes, teachers' job attitudes and feelings, and school organizational factors. Surveys of primary principals, teachers, and students in Hong Kong indicated that primary school-level teachers professionalism positively related to students'…

The relationship between teachers' perceptions of students' foreign-language (FL) academic skills and affective characteristics and their performance on tests of native language skill and FL aptitude was examined. Comparisons of final grades and teachers' perceptions by skill level groups found significant overall effects when grouping students by…

Reports a study that examined the differences between social studies achievement and self-esteem in low-income Hispanic fourth graders who participated in either cooperative or traditional learning groups. Pretesting and posttesting found higher achievement with cooperative learning. Self-esteem appeared to be higher for boys regardless of…

Paper introduces a collection of papers on educational assessment, noting controversies surrounding both old and new assessment methods, discussing the persistent set of technical issues that must be addressed by the research community in measurement, and examining work by the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student…

This study investigated how domain specifications controlled topic and rater reliability. History students completed three performance tasks. For each topic, they took prior knowledge tests, read primary materials, and wrote explanatory essays. Using a theory-based scoring rubric, four raters scored all essays. The rubric worked similarly on the…

This research applied evolving conceptions of learning to examine how to represent and evaluate students' and experts' cognitive structures. High school history students completed several tasks. Direct comparisons of the quality of student maps with expert maps showed that experts' concept maps could be used to score students' concept maps…

Techniques for establishing the reliability and validity of student writing assessment are presented. Raters scored collections of elementary students' narrative writing with holistic scores from two rubrics (one established and one new, performance-based rubric). The new rubric proved reliable and valid, though correlational patterns were not…

Describes research on the development of a measure of student metacognition. The brief, domain-independent measure serves as a collateral measure in construct validation, supporting exploration of the self-regulatory demands of performance assessment. Results show that metacognition can be directly and explicitly measured in the context of…

Based on the 1993 California Learning Assessment System Middle Grades Mathematics Performance Assessment, this study explored whether schools provided students equal opportunities to learn that which is assessed. Classroom observation of assessment administration and interviews with students and teachers at 13 schools found some differences…

Kindergartners who received learning-set instruction on unidimensional classification, unidimensional seriation, and number conservation were retested at the end of first grade. Followup tests showed that the cognitive advantage and improved academic achievement gained from that teaching method was generally present 15 months later. However, a…

A six-year case study was conducted on the impact of, and teachers' role in, the use of computers and the Mathcad program in mathematics instruction at a technical college. Results for 2 teachers and 51 of their students showed definite stages in the teachers' use of the computer technology. (SLD)

The eight chapters of this issue focus on the uses, issues, and implications of national and international indicators of educational performance. They explore progress in using indicators to inform policy decisions and describe the progress of selected countries in developing, analyzing, interpreting, and reporting indicators of educational…

The eight chapters of this theme issue use quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the nature and nurture of young participants in the mathematics Olympiad from five countries. Parallel studies are presented of winners from China, Taiwan, and the United States, along with descriptions of programs in Japan and Russia. (SLD)