In 2009, the New Teacher Project's "The Widget Effect" documented the failure of U.S. public school districts to recognize and act on differences in teacher effectiveness. We revisit these findings by compiling teacher performance ratings across 24 states that adopted major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. In the vast…

Since the implementation of the 2001 curriculum reform and the release of the 2004 college English requirements, learner autonomy has become one of the most important research themes in the field of ELT in China, especially college English, reflecting the tendency of a learner-centered teaching approach. In this paper, I have reviewed 39 studies…

This study investigated students' evaluating process and their perceptions of peer assessment when they engaged in peer assessment using Calibrated Peer Review. Calibrated Peer Review is a web-based application that facilitates peer assessment of writing. One hundred and thirty-two students in an introductory environmental science course…

Modelling-based teaching activities have been designed and analysed from distinct theoretical perspectives. In this paper, we use one of them--the model of modelling diagram (MMD)--as an analytical tool in a regular classroom context. This paper examines the challenges that arise when the MMD is used as an analytical tool to characterise the…

There is confusion among teachers in a school district in a southeastern state about the instructional use of the state-mandated Dominie assessment for word-level reading and phonemic awareness skills for kindergarten and first-grade students. Recent assessment data indicated that 20% of students tested in kindergarten and first grade needed…

The demands on schools, teachers, and students continue to increase as greater accountability measures are put into place at all levels. For teachers to meet these increased demands, it is important that they be provided opportunities to improve and enhance their content knowledge and pedagogy. One way to ensure the provision of these…

Elevated levels of anxiety have been associated with students' poor academic performance. Research on domain-specific anxiety patterns in reading has demonstrated that reading anxiety is associated with, yet distinctive from, general anxiety. Reading anxiety is an unpleasant emotional reaction experienced by students when reading; it is a specific…

Contemporary case studies rely on verbal arguments and set theory to build or evaluate theoretical claims. While existing procedures excel in the use of qualitative information (information about kind), they ignore quantitative information (information about degree) at central points of the analysis. Effectively, contemporary case studies rely on…

This article demonstrates the distortions arising from attempts to impose a rigid set of criteria on teacher assessment. The use of surface features of syntax and punctuation to determine grades created a situation where children's writing became artificial and lacking in interest.

The measurement error in principal components extracted from a set of fallible measures is discussed and evaluated. It is shown that as long as one or more measures in a given set of observed variables contains error of measurement, so also does any principal component obtained from the set. The error variance in any principal component is shown…

This conceptual study examines the analogies between schools and complex adaptive systems and identifies strategies used to manage schools as complex adaptive systems. Complex adaptive systems approach, introduced by the complexity theory, requires school administrators to develop new skills and strategies to realize their agendas in an…

This article introduces a number of methods that can be useful for examining the emergence of large-scale structures in collaboration networks. The study contributes to sociological research by investigating how clusters of research collaborators evolve and sometimes percolate in a collaboration network. Typically, we find that in our networks,…

An alternative to null hypothesis significance testing is presented and discussed. This approach, referred to as observation-oriented modeling, is centered on model building in an effort to explicate the structures and processes believed to generate a set of observations. In terms of analysis, this novel approach complements traditional methods…

The study evaluated the acceptability of text message- and voice-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methods among a sample (N = 74) of young men who have sex with men (MSM). We assessed the acceptability of text message- and voice-based EMA methods. Almost all participants (96%) reported that they would be willing to accept texts on their…

This chapter on high school equivalency describes recent events involved in updating the adult education high school equivalency assessment services and the entrance of additional assessments into the field.