More than 40 percent of students in California's public schools speak a language other than English at home. In the 2016-17 school year, 21 percent of all students, or more than 1.3 million, were English Learners (ELs). When former English Learners are included, the population of "ever ELs" expands to 38 percent of all K-12 students in…

This report describes research carried out over two distinct reclassification eras between the 2002-03 and 2013-14 academic years in the Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD) and San Diego Unified School Districts (SDUSD). Using student-level data and the multiple reclassification policies, the researchers are able to discern whether reclassification takes…

This document includes two technical appendices that accompany the main report, "English Learner Trajectories and Reclassification." The two appendices include: (1) Methodology; and (2) Supporting Tables and Figures. [For the full report, see ED603764.]

As the theme of the 2022 annual meeting of the American Education Research Association, cultivating equitable education systems has gained renewed attention amid an increasingly diverse society. However, systemic inequalities persist for traditionally underserved student populations. As a way to better address diverse students' needs, it is of…

Amid growing debates around international assessment tools in educational policy, few have critically examined how students themselves are cast in policy tool production processes and discourse. Drawing on Stuart Hall's concept of representation, we show how higher education (HE) "students" are constructed, fixed and normalized by the…

Although most assessment developers have a sense of the nature of the general student population, they often lack an understanding of the characteristics of special education students and English Language Learners (ELLs) who will participate in the assessment. The Race-to-the-Top Assessment Consortia have the rare opportunity to know who these…

This article provides the American Psychiatric Association's definition of attention deficit disorder (ADD) and then gives an overview of ADD by considering the three types of ADD, the developmental impact of ADD, factors contributing to ADD, identification and assessment of students with ADD (emphasizing multimethod and consideration of…

This article critically analyzes available definitions of learning disability. The general problem of definition is discussed first, followed by a discussion of individual definitions from the earliest to the latest. It is concluded that the definitions fail to provide substantive insight into the nature of the condition. (Contains extensive…

Recommendations designed to assist states in the creation of meaningful definitions of types of schools and students for use in the Council of Chief State School Officers' Education Data Improvement Project are presented. The Project's goals are to promote and facilitate the reform and refinement of the National Center for Education Statistics'…

The authors advocate the use of a pupil typology in which the variables of sex, race, family status, and I.Q. range are combined to form a pupil classification system. This systematic arrangement of data when combined with change in pupil performance, allows the creation of local norms. A scheme for comparing the change in pupil performance among…

This explorative data mining project used distance based clustering algorithm to study 3 indicators, called OIndex, of student behavioral data and stabilized at a 6-cluster scenario following an exhaustive explorative study of 4, 5, and 6 cluster scenarios produced by K-Means and TwoStep algorithms. Using principles in data mining, the study…

A replication study compared 86 petition students who received course substitutions for the college foreign language (FL) requirement with 40 nonpetition students who fulfilled the requirement by passing FL courses. Findings indicate more than half of all the students did not meet criteria for learning disability classification. (Contains…

An overview is provided of the similarities and distinctions between individuals with autism and those with Asperger syndrome (AS). The cognitive and neurocognitive profiles underlying deficits characteristic of autism spectrum disorders are reviewed and particular emphasis is placed on comparisons of high-functioning autism to AS on the basis of…

Discusses the difficulty in validating central auditory processing disorder (CAPD) as a diagnostic label in school-aged children, and examines the extent to which reading, language, and attention disorders in school-aged children involve perceptual dysfunctions limited to a single sensory modality. Multimodal perceptual testing for diagnosis is…