Mr. Smith and Ms. D'Amico are two veteran science teachers in a well-performing school district. Both teachers use weekly lab exercises and experiments as formative assessments. In their middle school classrooms, children are engaged and eager to learn. As students walk into Mr. Smith's classroom, a prescribed, step-by-step procedure of the day's…

Two experimental studies at one urban middle school investigated the effects of the combination of Tier I and Tier II evidence-based reading instruction compared to Tier I alone on struggling sixth-grade readers (N = 109). All participants received free or reduced-price lunch, and 95% were considered English learners at some point in their school…

Despite many ELT experts' opinions that while teaching a foreign language one should not use the mother tongue in the classroom, new researches show that sparing use of the mother tongue can be effective for the L2 learners. It is true that the 6- year compulsory English education of the school graduates of Saudi Arabia is not quite up to the…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of instruction in information problem solving within the world wide web (the web) environment. The participants were 20 seventh and eighth grade students with a learning disability (LD) in reading. An experimental pretest-posttest control group method was used to investigate the…

To date, research involving homemade PowerPoint games as an instructional tool has not shown statistically significant gains in student performance. This paper examines the results of a study comparing the performance of students in a high school chemistry course who created homemade PowerPoint games as a test review with the students who used a…

Assessment practices that aim to promote both quality and equity may be compromised in a higher education market where students are consumers and grades the currency exchanged for measures of success. In such a climate, academics report feeling pressured to make course content and assessment less challenging in order to obtain positive student…

The purpose of this action research study was to investigate undergraduate preservice student-teachers' interpretations of written reflections and how these written reflections impacted their thoughts about teaching practices. A second question was to investigate how preservice teachers talked about their processes of reflection beyond the…

This research study employs a second-order meta-analysis procedure to summarize 40 years of research activity addressing the question, does computer technology use affect student achievement in formal face-to-face classrooms as compared to classrooms that do not use technology? A study-level meta-analytic validation was also conducted for purposes…

The success of any educational reform depends upon the quality of teachers and in turn the quality of teachers depends to a large extent on the quality of teacher education and quality of teacher education mainly depends upon the teacher training institutions. Education is a nation building activity and teachers are the pillars of the educational…

This study responds to a request from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to analyze National Board certification among high school teachers in understudied subject areas and locales to help fill gaps in the research literature. The authors also were asked to use multiple indicators of performance. The research team selected two…

Improving teacher effectiveness is a key strategy to ensure student readiness for college and careers and to address achievement gaps and persistent low performance. In response to the new Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (CCSS-ELA) the National Writing Project (NWP) created a professional development (PD) program to support…

The Cultural Heritage Bilingual Program (CHBP) was developed for English Language Learner (ELL) students from language groups not served by current bilingual programs in the Houston Independent School District (HISD), which are designed for Spanish-speaking ELLs. The largest group of students in this category consists of ELLs whose home language…

Background: The last comparative analysis of how the six regional accrediting commissions review distance education programs was conducted in 2000. A few months later in March 2001 all six accrediting bodies did something that they hadn't done before, they adopted common standards for reviewing distance education programs. Purpose: The purpose was…

Biology and chemistry graduates (n = 29) on a one year, post graduate, initial teacher training course were asked about their perceptions of written lesson appraisals produced by mentors when observing their teaching. Data were collected using the same open questions at three points in their course. The data relating to mentors who had received…

Two classroom approaches to reducing racial and ethnic prejudice among college students were compared: a class session based on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and an educational lecture drawn from a textbook on the psychology of racial differences. Undergraduates who were enrolled in two separate classes on racial differences were exposed…