In 2011, AISD worked with the nationally recognized New Teacher Center (NTC) to create a comprehensive survey to help the district to better understand how teachers and school staff feel about critical issues that can influence educator retention and effectiveness. This report provides a district summary of staff survey results. A separate report…

The Student Substance Use and Safety Survey, administered annually to a random, representative sample of AISD students, provides self-report data on student knowledge, attitudes, and behavior related to substance use and school safety issues. This report summarizes district results for Spring 2013.

Despite the assurances of store employees, whenever a deal is on offer it always pays to apply a little logic (and mathematics) to see just how to use it most effectively. In this article, the author displays how to employ this technique by using the example of a shoe store that advertised "second pair half price" (with the fine print…

The Implementing Standards-Based Accountability (ISBA) study was designed to examine the strategies that states, districts, and schools are using to implement standards-based accountability under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and how these strategies are associated with classroom practices and student achievement in mathematics and science.…

Given a set of urns, each filled with a mix of black chips and white chips, what is the probability of drawing a black chip from the last urn after some sequential random shifts of chips among the urns? The Total Probability Formula (TPF) is the common tool to solve such a problem. However, when the number of urns is more than two and the number…

This report provides a portrait of children who entered Head Start for the first time in fall 2009 and completed a year in the program in spring 2010. It also describes their family backgrounds and the classrooms and programs that serve them. Data are drawn from the 2009 cohort of the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES), a…

A product-based professional development model has significantly improved the ability and willingness of P-8 teachers to use and integrate technology into instruction. This paper discusses the impacts this staff professional development model. The model was used to train 18 teachers to effectively use and integrate technology in their ESL…

Evidence suggests that tracking of students on the secondary level may not only be discriminatory, but also counterproductive to the personal, educational, and economic potential of all students. The English and Social Studies department of Oak Hill High School, in Wales, Maine, developed an intervention program concerning heterogeneous grouping…

In 1980, the Maryland State Education Agency initiated a statewide effort, School Improvement Through Instructional Process (SITIP), to put into practice the results of research on classroom management and school effectiveness. SITIP was intended to provide training and technical support to all local education agencies (LEA's) during the adoption…

This document focuses on trends in school and home frameworks for learning found in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data from 1977 to 1990. Trends in classroom instruction, course taking, students' attitudes, homework versus television viewing, and reading habits and home support for literacy are considered. One table provides…

Students of the Austin (Texas) Independent School District who had been in first through sixth grade and had been retained at some point in their school careers were eligible to attend the 1982 summer school for retainees. A total of 1,193 students were enrolled for at least part of the summer school, with a 94 percent attendance rate for the days…