Similar content has tremendous utility in classroom and online learning environments. For example, similar content can be used to combat cheating, track students' learning over time, and model students' latent knowledge. These different use cases for similar content all rely on different notions of similarity, which make it difficult to determine…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to analyze the readability of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Part B procedural safeguard documents, as distributed by each of the 50 U.S. states. Results were compared to the 5th- to 6th-grade readability guideline for documents recommended by experts in health literacy and health…

Many of today's adolescents are constantly engaging with information through texting, watching videos, listening to music, and even writing papers. Learning to interact properly with information through writing presents a challenge for the students because they are employing all of these applications at once and believe that they are multitasking…

In today's Web 2.0 world, teachers are perpetually struggling with how to incorporate technology into the classroom effectively in order to meet the diverse literacy needs of 21st-century learners. Utilizing the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE, 2008) Position Statement addressing these needs, the theoretical framework of Lankshear…

This article describes an outreach program to broaden participation in computing to include more students with visual impairments. The precollege workshops target students in grades 7-12 and engage students with robotics programming. The use of robotics at the precollege level has become popular in part due to the availability of Lego Mindstorm…

Using a theoretical framework of adolescent social capital, this study examines what one middle school does or does not do to help the students at the school make friends and acquaintances. After reviewing the related literature on adolescent social capital, social network theory, social goal motivation, and best practices middle school…

There is increasing concern about cheating in the secondary schools. This article describes the prevalence of dishonesty in testing, motivation for student cheating, new forms of deception using technology tools, initiatives to protect security of tests, methods students use to obtain papers without crediting the original source, tools for…

Many students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing are eligible for a signing accommodation for state and other standardized tests. The signing accommodation, however, presents several challenges for testing programs that attempt to administer tests under standardized conditions. One potential solution for many of these challenges is the use of…