Recent federal education legislation has recognized the over-identification and overrepresentation of students in special education and mandated that schools use evidence-based teaching strategies and instructional interventions within the general education classroom before initiating a special education referral. Legislation also put greater…

Seven district improvement initiatives were implemented in 2011-12 in the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS). All were well designed and coordinated, with common goal setting processes and use of common monitoring tools. All initiatives either met or partially met 2011-12 goals. Some were more successful in showing student outcomes, with the…

The 2002 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) contained provisions that expanded state and district accountability for improving all schools and increasing the learning and achievement of all students, including those who struggle to master basic skills in reading and mathematics. In 2011, the U.S. Department of…

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to better understand the instructional response to intervention (RTI) practices implemented by elementary level special and general educators responsible for teaching reading. Web-based survey research combined with follow-up interviews were used to gather information from a random sample of general…

The field of literacy education has long been concerned with the question of how to help classroom teachers improve their practices so that students will improve as readers. Although there is consensus on what characterizes effective professional development, the reading research on which this consensus is based most often is small scale and…

School accountability and student assessment are closely associated in educational jurisdictions' attempts to monitor student achievement, focus instruction, and improve subsequent student and school performance. The research reported in this article examines the School Effectiveness Framework in Ontario, Canada, exploring the foundations upon…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of student learning from community engagement by critically assessing the implementation of this pedagogical approach in the context of teaching and learning chemistry and also evaluating the role of personal development in student-community engagement.…

The authors analyse the reasons for Croatian higher education reform since 2003, as well as its consequences. The main proposition of the paper is that the implementation of the Bologna Process in Croatia has failed due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the goals of the process, a lack of correspondence between the cycles of higher education…

Using clickers to gauge student understanding in large classrooms is well documented. Less well known is the effectiveness of using clickers with youth for test taking in large-scale Extension programs. This article describes the benefits and challenges of collecting evaluation data using clickers with a third-grade population participating in a…

Background/Context: Testing accommodations have been widely utilized as a way of increasing the validity of content assessments for English language learner (ELL) students. However, concerns have also arisen regarding the appropriateness of accommodation use, including the accessibility and fairness of accommodations. While many states have…

The aim of this report is to map, for the second time, the state of play of the higher education reforms in accordance with the Bologna Process in the 27 countries participating in the Tempus programme. The 2010 edition described the situation at that time and concluded that all Tempus Partner Countries are following the process to some extent,…

In the face of dwindling financial resources, educational leaders are looking to refine resource allocation while maintaining a focus on improved student outcomes. This article presents initial findings from a professional development state initiative called Effective Behavioral and Instructional Support Systems (EBISS). The EBISS initiative aims…

In a recent publication, Senge ("All systems go: the change imperative for whole system reform." Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, 2010, x) stated "at no time in history has there been a more powerful need for a new vision of the purpose of education." Increasingly citizens, academics and practitioners are calling for radical…

Secondary school administrators are increasingly finding themselves in the position of implementing Response to Intervention (RTI). This system of providing progressively intensive levels of intervention for the purposes of preventing academic failure and identifying children with learning disability may be useful at the secondary level. However,…

Response to intervention (RTI) is advocated in elementary school as a system-wide, multitiered model of academic and behavioral interventions. Middle schools have begun adopting RTI models based on these existing elementary models. This investigation into current middle school RTI practices describes technical aspects as well as some of cultural…