The first step in teaching-to-understand economics is not teaching "the rules," but working with fundamental economic models from the outset. Many of the concepts in economics are illustrated through models. Students must: (1) be able to draw these models; (2) understand the assumptions of the models; and (3) use the models for analysis.…

For a number of years now, South Africa, like many other countries, has been debating a major paradigm shift in education, a shift from learning and teaching, which focused primarily on content to learning and teaching focused on outcomes. One of the most dramatic trends in education over the past decade has been the shift towards the use of…

The main purpose of this study was to compare the strategies used by Chinese-speaking students when confronted with familiar versus unfamiliar topics in a multiple-choice format reading comprehension test. The focus was on describing what students do when they are taking reading comprehension tests by asking students to verbalize their thoughts.…

Although much is known about how students perform on standardized tests, little research exists concerning how students think and process while taking such tests. This mixed methods action research study was designed to investigate if a constructivist approach to test preparation could yield improved results for 37 English language arts freshmen…

This article explores the reasoning employed by high school students to answer a set of multiple-choice history questions. The questions come from New York State's Global History and Geography Regents exam. The Regents exams, together with a particularly well-regarded and ambitious set of content standards, are the cornerstone of the state's…

Although past research indicates that giving brief quizzes, administered either regularly or randomly, may lead to improvement in students' performance on major exams, negligible research has targeted daily writing activities that require the processing of course information at a deeper level than might result from simply reading course materials…

An attempt was made to develop self-directedness in students through teaching them how to write questions in multiple-choice format, and by making students aware that phrasing things in multiple-choice format is a way of asking questions that is conducive to developing thinking, writing, and test-taking skills. The study, a form of reflective…

This handbook provides guidelines for teaching test-taking skills to students of all grade levels to help the students raise their standardized test scores. Topics covered include: understanding instructions and following directions, efficient use of time, intelligent guessing, and application of special strategies for multiple-choice and…

Active student engagement with course materials, such as note-taking and cooperative learning, is associated with greater performance. This study investigated the relationship between scores achieved by students in an undergraduate course and active engagement during testing, whether using a cheat sheet or engaging in a form of cooperative…