Influencing major education policies in the US such as school vouchers and charter schools, market theory assumes that organizational autonomy, parental choice, and competition between schools improve the quality of education. However, whether those policies can influence the instructional core of schools is not well understood. Comparing private…

Concept-based teaching is presumably more effective than popular procedure-based instruction in helping students develop conceptual understanding, an important conceptual base for mathematics teaching reforms in many countries. This study examined the extent to which this assumption is true by controlling the influences of student socioeconomic…

Purpose: Automatic speech analysis (ASA) and automatic speech recognition systems are increasingly being used in the treatment of speech sound disorders (SSDs). When utilized as a home practice tool or in the absence of the clinician, the ASA system has the potential to facilitate treatment gains. However, the feedback accuracy of such systems…

Although scholars have examined the effects of global tests on national and regional educational governance, few researchers have studied their impact on education in the Arabian Gulf. This research fills the knowledge gap by studying the international spectacle of PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS results in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) -- two…

Student responses to the West Virginia Educational Standards Test (WESTEST) 2 Online Writing Assessment are scored by a computer-scoring engine. The scoring method is not widely understood among educators, and there exists a misperception that it is not comparable to hand scoring. To address these issues, the West Virginia Department of Education…

International achievement comparison studies assess students on core subjects such as Reading, Mathematics and Science. Students who do not speak the test language at home can be expected to be disadvantaged because of language proficiency. The test language effect has not been given sufficient attention. The present study investigated probable…

The authors evaluated the effects of P-SELL, a science curricular and professional development intervention for fifth-grade students with a focus on English language learners (ELLs). Using a randomized controlled trial design with 33 treatment and 33 control schools across three school districts in one state, we found significant and meaningfully…

Why has large-scale standardised testing attracted such a bad press? Why has pedagogic benefit to be derived from test results been downplayed? The paper investigates this question by first surveying the pros and cons of testing in the literature, and goes on to examine educators' responses to standardised, large-scale tests in a sample of low…

Literature in the United States provides many examples of no difference in student achievement when measured against the mode of test administration i.e., paper-pencil and online versions of the test. However, most of these researches centre on "regular" students who do not require differential teaching methods or different evaluation…

This paper provides evidence on the sources of differences in inequality in educational scores and their evolution over time in four European countries. Using Programme for International Student Assessment data from the 2000 and the 2006 waves, the paper shows that inequality decreased in Germany and Spain (two "decentralised" schooling…

We report an investigation of the validity of teachers' ratings of children's progress in "phonics" as a screener for dyslexia. Seventy-three 6-year-olds from a whole school population were identified as "at risk" of dyslexia according to teacher judgements of slow progression through phonic phases. Six months later, children's attainments in…

Enthusiasm for problem-based learning (PBL) is widespread, yet there exists little rigorous experimental evidence of its effectiveness, especially in K-12 populations. Reported here is a highly controlled experimental study of PBL in a middle school population. Between- and within-subject comparisons are made of students learning the same material…

The newly developed computerized Constructive Multiple-choice Testing system is introduced. The system combines short answer (SA) and multiple-choice (MC) formats by asking examinees to respond to the same question twice, first in the SA format, and then in the MC format. This manipulation was employed to collect information about the two…

This article provides examples of how serious misconceptions can result when only "all student" scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are used for simplistic state-to-state comparisons. Suggestions for better treatment are presented. The article also compares Kentucky's eighth grade EXPLORE testing to NAEP…

Young learners with severe visual impairments are restricted in many ways, and psychologists and special needs teachers require information about the nature and extent of the possible educationally handicapping effects. This article, written by Michael Tobin, Emeritus Professor of Special Education within the School of Education at the University…