Our education system is in desperate need of innovation. Despite radical advances in nearly every other sector, public school students continue to attend school in the same buildings and according to the same schedule as students did more than a hundred years ago, and performance is either stagnant or worsening. One of the most important…

In this paper, I examine how student academic achievements and behavior were affected by a school finance policy experiment undertaken in elementary schools in Israel. Begun in 2004, the funding formula changed from a budget set per class to a budget set per student, with more weight given to students from lower socioeconomic and lower educational…

Elementary school students spend less time learning cursive handwriting than they did in years past. The declining emphasis on cursive writing has been attributed to the increasing use of technology, the growing proportion of class time spent preparing for standardized tests, and the perception that the time students spend learning to write in…

This report examines what the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) can tell us about charter school enrollment and student performance compared to that of regular public schools. The study uses NAEP reading and mathematics data from 2011 and the earlier years when charter school data first became available (2003 for grade 4; 2005 for…

There are large differences across countries in instructional time in schooling institutions. Can these differences explain some of the differences across countries in pupils' achievements in different subjects? While research in recent years provides convincing evidence about the effect of several inputs in the education production function,…

The authors investigated the effects of student spatial ability, as measured by Raven's Progressive Colored Matrices (J. C. Raven, 1938) and type of instructional program on geometry achievement. Sixth-grade students worked through either 6 instructional activities in Geometer's Sketchpad (Key Curriculum Press, 1993), a dynamic geometry program,…

Two studies examined the validity and factor structure of the Teacher Observation of Classroom Adaptation-Checklist, an instrument used to evaluate school-based programs. The checklist is a cost-effective alternative to the original interview format, and the factor structure is consistent across gender, race, age, and time of administration.…

We conducted 2 studies to investigate undergraduate performance, perceptions, and time required in completing sequentially ordered, randomly ordered, or reverse ordered exams in introductory psychology classes. Study 1 compared the outcomes and perceptions of students (N = 66) on 3 non-comprehensive multiple-choice exams which were sequentially,…

A study finds that American students are engaged with lessons only 54 percent of the time, due to external preoccupations and uninspired instruction. The Heritage Foundation's "No Excuses" report makes misleading correlations between scores, phonics, and socioeconomic variables. Florida housing prices reflect letter grades assigned to…

The purpose of the present study is to evaluate the use of a reinforcement package with four middle school students who were below grade level in reading. Data were gathered, independently by two observers, for on-task behavior for the number of correct words read for a two-minute timed trial, and for book pre- and posttests. These data were…

Describes performance criteria for users of computer assisted instruction (CAI) that are used to provide users with feedback about their performance relative to other users. This study evaluated 146 novice users on their percentages of correct responses, time required for completion, and number of times the CAI tutorial was performed. (LRW)

The authors extend the standard education production function and student time allocation analysis to focus on the interactions between student effort and performance over the semester. The purged instrumental variable technique is used to obtain consistent estimators of the structural parameters of the model using data from intermediate…

In the winter and spring of 2007-08, the Center on Education Policy (CEP) expanded its ongoing research on the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) by conducting case studies of six schools in Rhode Island to learn more about the influence of NCLB and related state accountability policies on curriculum, instruction, and student…

Does the use of an online homework system such as WebAssign (http://webassign.net) in an introductory astronomy course affect student performance? Four sections of introductory astronomy were compared in various homework situations, from no graded homework to graded homework online. Results show that there are no significant differences in…

What happens to English academic achievement when valued class time is devoted to a foreign language in the elementary schools (FLES) program? Is there a reduction in achievement as suggested by a time-on-task hypothesis, or is there some form of compensation, as suggested by additive bilingualism? The school district in this study started a FLES…