How should schools assign students to more rigorous math courses so as best to help their academic outcomes? We identify several hundred California middle schools that used 7th-grade test scores to place students into 8th-grade algebra courses and use a regression discontinuity design to estimate average impacts and heterogeneity across schools.…

Numerical magnitude knowledge is related to current math abilities and predictive of future math learning. However, this relationship has previously been shown only for knowledge of positive magnitudes; the present study is the first, to our knowledge, to examine the connection between magnitude knowledge and math ability with negative integers.…

We know from previous survey research that teachers who hold high expectations for all of their students significantly increase the odds that those young people will go on to complete high school and college. One indicator of teachers' expectations is their approach to grading--specifically, whether they subject students to more or less rigorous…

Jefferson Education Accelerator contracted with Empirical Education to study the effectiveness of the implementation of Agile Mind's "Agile Assessment" in an urban school district in the Northeast United States during the 2016-17 school year. "Agile Assessment" is a system for building formative assessments that includes…

Latent classes of effective and non-effective Algebra I teachers were established using measurements of teacher promoted engagement, teacher promoted understanding, and classroom management from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project (MET Project) database. Historically, robust measures of effective teaching exist in the literature; however,…

This pilot study explores the effectiveness of a strategy for overcoming post-primary students' misconceptions within the topic of algebra. Although central to the study of mathematics, algebra can be an area of difficulty for many students. A misconception is typically classified as flawed understanding of a concept causing repeated errors, and…

Grade inflation is pervasive in American high schools. Is rampant grade inflation cause for concern? How teachers' grading standards affect student success is an empirical question--one that the author addresses in this article in a new study of roughly 350,000 North Carolina students taking Algebra I between 2006 and 2016. The author first…

The development of six online quizzes to support students' study of an introductory mathematics masters module at The Open University is described and their use evaluated. The quizzes were implemented using the "STACK" online e-assessment system, which is powered by a computer-algebra engine. Evaluation of student feedback and an initial…

Online educational technologies offer opportunities for providing individualized feedback and detailed profiles of students' skills. Yet many technologies for mathematics education assess students based only on the correctness of either their final answers or responses to individual steps. In contrast, examining the choices students make for how…

In this study, external representations and the problems encountered related transformation process between representations towards limit concept were investigated. "Limit Representation Conversion Test" was administered to 41 preservice mathematics teachers studying at a state university in central Turkey during 2018-2019 academic…

Stopping rules for fixed-form tests with graduated item difficulty are intended to stop administration of a test at the point where students are sufficiently unlikely to provide a correct response following a pattern of incorrect responses. Although widely employed in fixed-form tests in education, little research has been done to empirically…

Tutorials in introductory physics (TIP) are a well known resource for use in third level insititutions for developing students' understanding of physics concepts. However, this resource is only sparingly used at second level. This study presents an adaptation of the approach taken in TIP to enhance the understanding of vector addition of a group…

Enacting equitable teaching practices and sustaining those practices continue to be challenges in most high schools (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2018), particularly in an era of high-stakes testing. Just one year after Boaler and Staples (2008) reported on the successes of "Railside High," where equitable teaching…

The literature shows that the integration of technological tools, like "GeoGebra," has the potential to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics. The aim of this study was to see whether "GeoGebra" could be used to address identified, systematic misconceptions that National Certificate Vocational (NCV) students hold…

Using a cluster-randomized controlled trial research design, this study investigates the effect of the first year of a three-year teacher professional development program on grades 1 and 2 student achievement in mathematics. Although the findings reported in the present report do not meet the standard cutoff for statistical significance (e.g., 95%…