All students deserve effective feedback. General principles for effective feedback should be adjusted depending on the learner's needs. Feedback to struggling students should include focusing on the process, selecting only one or just a few points, giving self-referenced feedback to describe progress or capability, being very clear, and checking…

The academic success, tendency to stay out of trouble, and physical health of children of immigrants to the United States tend to decline significantly from the first to the third generation. This article reports that this troubling pattern brought researchers together at Brown University to examine a provocative question: Is becoming American a…

Girls have been posting higher reading scores than boys for decades, but other trends suggest they may also have surpassed boys in overall academic performance. Girls have higher high school grade-point averages, are more widely represented as school valedictorians, and attend and graduate from college in greater numbers than boys. All this has…

The evidence is clear: America's boys are being left behind by current practices in the classroom. Boys are dropping out of high schools in significant numbers, failing to complete college degrees, and behaving more violently. The author states that teachers should pay close attention to statistics that track these trends, seriously regard the…

Almost everyone knows what the term "achievement gap" means, although the key to closing it remains elusive. Despite efforts spanning a decade or more, the disparity in test scores, graduation rates, and other indicators of academic success separating many students of color from many of their white and Asian peers has not been eliminated. In a…

Superintendent Steve Joel had reason to be concerned when he got a call from the police chief telling him that federal immigration authorities were coming to the local Swift & Company meat-packing plant to round up undocumented workers as part of a six-state raid. Of the 8,000 students in the Grand Island School District in Central Nebraska,…

In recent years, there has been heightened awareness of the importance of early childhood education and high school as intervention points in the educational lives of America's children. Less attention has been paid to the importance of the upper elementary grades and middle school and the role they must play in the preparation of students for…

Discusses studies by Donald LaSalle showing that students' performance can vary widely over the day according to the workings of their individual biological clocks. Presents exercises to help children identify their own "body rhythm prime time" and suggests rescheduling instruction to accommodate these differences. Condensed from…

Educators have not been teaching to the learning style of boys, nor have they kept up with recent findings in brain research on the developmental differences between boys and girls. With all the education reform efforts about, with new accountability standards so high, school districts nationwide struggle to balance budgets and increase student…

The fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's school desegregation order in Brown v. Board of Education has intensified public awareness of the persistent gap in academic achievement between black students and white students. The black-white gap is made up partly of the difference between the achievement of all lower-class students and that…

The number of minority students in the schools is rapidly increasing. Simultaneously, the number of minority teachers is decreasing. Achievement gaps by minority students exists across the nation. Due to the lack of culturally responsive pedagogy and practice in their preparation programs, teachers have resorted to less effective measures in…

Society knows well that males outperform females on mathematics portions of college entrance examinations. In 2003, for example, males scored an average 537 points on the mathematics section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, while females averaged 503. Less well known is that males also show a slight advantage on the verbal portion. These gaps…

In the 20 years since the federal report on education "A Nation at Risk" appeared, much has been written on test scores of students in the United States versus their counterparts elsewhere. One of the issues is whether their scores are in fact inferior, or merely a statistical difference due to their universal schooling philosophy. Since…

Achievement gaps in standardized tests consist of the differences between test scores of students of color and those of white students and between scores of poor children and those of their wealthier peers. Maylone determines student testing behaviors, herein referred to as TestThink, which reflect differences in students' abilities to behave in…