Current educational reform in K-12 schools in this nation is much driven by the No Child Left Behind Act. One central goal of NCLB is to "bring all students (including special education children) up to grade level in reading and math, to close the achievement gap and to hold schools accountable for results"(ed.gov). Varied innovative…

A study determined the effect of parental involvement on reading achievement of participating students. Subjects were 22 fifth-grade students in a Chicago public school who received parental involvement and 19 students in the same school who did not receive parental involvement. Subjects' scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills were used in the…

A study examined the effect of geographic mobility on elementary school students' achievement. Although such mobility, which requires students to make multiple moves among schools, can have a negative impact on academic achievement, the hypothesis for the study was that it was not a determining factor in reading achievement test scores. Subjects…

Two projects that have explored the feasibility of computer-generated verbal score reports for the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills are reported. The first, the Madison Project, designed, produced, and evaluated computer-generated testing reports that were useful to teachers and informative to parents. The reports, which were narrative in format, were…

A study investigated the effectiveness of a program to improve the reading/vocabulary skills of an ability-grouped fifth grade class of "low achievers" (N=15) through the implementation of a literature-based whole language approach. Students were read aloud to from quality children's literature. From these books, spelling and vocabulary…

This paper highlights measurement issues faced when attempting to assess and interpret results of a school improvement project. Based on the assumption that to measure effectiveness, one must measure a wide variety of school factors, the paper presents a broad perspective on measurement problems and dilemmas in analyzing norm-referenced test data…

The Anchor Test Study provides a method for translating a pupil's score on any one of eight widely used standardized reading tests for Grades 4, 5, and 6 to a corresponding score on any of the other seven tests, as well as furnishing new nationally representative norms for each of the eight tests. In addition, the Study presents new estimates of…

The effects of Chapter 1 (Education Consolidation and Improvement Act) reading pull-out programs on the reading achievement of participating students was studied for 30 fifth- and sixth-grade students from a Chicago (Illinois) elementary school serving a low socioeconomic neighborhood with a minority enrollment of 99 percent. Fifteen students had…

The Anchor Test Study provides a method for translating a pupil's score on any one of eight widely used standardized reading tests for Grades 4, 5, and 6 to a corresponding score of any of the other seven tests, as well as furnishing new nationally representative norms for each of the eight tests. In addition, the Study presents new estimates of…

The passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 established foreign languages as a core curricular area. Nonetheless, educational policymakers at the state and local levels often opt to allocate greater resources and give instructional priority to content areas in which students, and ultimately the school systems themselves, are held…