In this paper we explored whether engaging in two inquiry skills associated with data collection, designing controlled experiments and testing stated hypotheses, within microworlds for one physical science domain (density) impacted the acquisition of inquiry skills in another domain (phase change). To do so, we leveraged educational data mining…

The Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) was a three-year study conducted in the Metropolitan Nashville School System from 2006-07 through 2008-09, in which middle school mathematics teachers voluntarily participated in a controlled experiment to assess the effect of financial rewards for teachers whose students showed unusually large gains…

Improving teaching quality is widely recognized as critical to addressing deficiencies in secondary school education, yet the field has struggled to identify rigorously evaluated teacher-development approaches that can produce reliable gains in student achievement. A randomized controlled trial of My Teaching Partner-Secondary--a Web-mediated…

ASSISTments is a web-based math tutor designed to address the need for timely student assessment while simultaneously providing instruction, thereby avoiding lost instruction time that typically occurs during assessment. This article presents a quasi-experiment that evaluates whether ASSISTments use has an effect on improving middle school…

Learning in educational settings most often emphasizes declarative and procedural knowledge. Studies of expertise, however, point to other, equally important components of learning, especially improvements produced by experience in the extraction of information: "Perceptual learning." Here we describe research that combines principles of…

This project entailed a three-year efficacy evaluation of the Computer and Team Assisted Mathematical Acceleration (CATAMA) Lab developed by the Center for Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University. The CATAMA Lab was proposed as an immediate and practical approach to addressing the different types of math deficits held by…

Introduction: The Maui Hawaii Educational consortium (the Maui School District and Maui Community College) sought scientifically based evidence for the effectiveness of the Cognitive Tutor (CT) Algebra I Curriculum to inform adoption decisions. Decision makers were particularly interested in whether the use of the CT program affects achievement of…

Alum Rock Elementary Union School District had an interest in a middle school program being introduced by Teachers' Curriculum Institute (TCI) called "History Alive!" Supplementary materials from TCI were already in use in many of the classrooms and several of the district administrators were interested in whether the full middle school…

The article describes an application of the Organizational Climate Descriptive Questionnaire (OCDQ) in the author's dissertation. He explored the possible relationships among [Fred] Fiedler's assessment of psychological distance of the leader (the principal) and the organizational climate of schools as assessed by the then recently developed OCDQ…