The challenge of "educational" assessments--assessments that advance the purposes of learning and instruction--is to provide useful information regarding students' progress towards the goals of instruction in ways that are reliable and not idiosyncratic. In this commentary, the author indicates that the challenges are actually more…

Learning behavior of young children of contrasting socioeconomic backgrounds is examined in this study, which poses the question: what are the necessary or sufficient environmental conditions for the establishment of identifiable patterns of behavior? Socioeconomic level (SEL), the principal independent variable, was defined in terms of parental…

Studied were the relationships between children's attainment of the concept of conservation of liquid and certain student characteristics. Student factors investigated were socio-economic background (high and low), status levels (conservers and non-conservers), verbal and non-verbal achievement, and science achievement. Classification of subjects…

Three experiments were conducted to examine the effects of adult expectations on children's learning and performance; one in-classroom study and two experimental studies were made in order to investigate developmental trends in susceptibility to expectancy effects and the relationship of induced vs. self-generated expectancies vis-a-vis children's…

The purpose of this study was to compare how learning outcomes are influenced by a number of key student composition (language background, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and gender) and school context variables on a direct writing performance assessment. The sample was randomly selected from a population of 13,604 third graders in 175 public…