This paper investigates differences in students having various scores when designing controlled experiments in two types of scientific inquiry tasks (a fair test and an exhaustive test). We measure temporal features of preparation time and execution time, which reflect respectively the process of question understanding and answer planning and that…

The National Indian Education Study (NIES) is designed to describe the condition of education for fourth- and eighth-grade American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) students in the United States. NIES is conducted under the direction of the National Center for Education Statistics on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Indian…

In recent decades, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has implemented reforms aimed at improving and controlling the quality of the teaching workforce in public schools. Among those reforms are tests for licensure that assess both general and content-area specific knowledge, requirements for ongoing teacher professional development, and procedures…

Are U.S. and, in particular, Hoosier students competitive and ready to succeed in an ever-changing and increasingly global economic landscape? This question is frequently considered by K-12 education stakeholders at all levels, including national, state, and local officials. One of the central ways in which education systems can compare themselves…

Every country--and even every community--has populations of students who severely underperform relative to other groups and to their own potential. These performance differences are generally called achievement gaps, and they tend to focus on gaps at basic levels of academic proficiency. But such gaps also exist among the highest levels of…

Gender gaps in the development of mathematical and scientific literacy have important implications for the general public's understanding of scientific issues and for the underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and math. We subjected data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to a meta-analysis to examine…

This study examined whether or not fourth-graders could fully demonstrate their writing skills on the computer and factors associated with their performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) computer-based writing assessment. The results suggest that high-performing fourth-graders (those who scored in the upper 20 percent…

A founding ideal of American democracy is that merit, not accident of birth, should determine individuals' income and social status. Schools have assumed a major role in judging key elements of merit among young people--namely, academic skills, hard work, self-discipline, and cooperative behavior. Schools do so mainly by evaluating students in a…

In one of the first large-scale analyses of urban trends on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the Council of the Great City Schools and the American Institutes for Research identified urban school systems that demonstrated high achievement or significant achievement gains on the NAEP, and examined possible factors behind…

Typically, achievement gaps between groups of students are measured as either differences in average scores or differences in proficiency rates. But, practitioners, policymakers, and researchers have long recognized that these approaches don't tell the whole story. Average scores, for example, are good at summarizing trends but can mask real…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress statistics show that boys are underachieving in literacy compared to girls. Attempts to redress the problem in various Global North countries and particularly Australia and the United Kingdom have failed to make any impact. However, there are boys who are doing well in literacy. The aim of this…

Maintaining America's productivity as a nation depends importantly on developing a highly qualified cadre of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals. To realize that objective requires a system of schooling that produces students with advanced math and science skills. To see how well schools in the United States do at…

This report is intended to provide some preliminary excellence gap data and kick start the national discussion on the importance of excellence in the national and state K-12 education systems. After briefly summarizing recent literature on the excellence gap, the trends in National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores along gender,…

This report measures trends in performance among urban schools receiving federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) awards as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). The Council of the Great City Schools aims to document how member districts of the Council of the Great City Schools implemented SIG and specifically what…

With the tenth anniversary of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) fast approaching, that law's legacy continues to be fiercely contested. This new analysis of National Assessment of Educational Progress scores--focusing on Texas and on the entire nation--by former National Center for Education Statistics commissioner Mark Schneider finds that solid gains…