Background/Context: This work contributes to the growing body of scholarly and popular literature on middle-class parental anxiety and competition to ensure their children's academic success. Specifically, this study provides a better understanding of the measures parents will take to obtain high status gifted and talented (G&T) placements…

This article reports findings from a 3-year qualitative study exploring the experiences of African American preservice teachers as they prepared for the Praxis "basic skills" teacher-licensure exam, a gatekeeper to many teacher-education programs. Using the construct of self-efficacy, results illustrate how students assess their Praxis…

Language test preparation has often been studied within the consequential validity framework in relation to ethics, equity, fairness, and washback of assessment. The use of independent and integrated speaking tasks in the "TOEFL iBT"® test represents a significant development and innovation in assessing speaking ability in academic…

This qualitative study explored educators' sense making of and responses to No Child Left Behind and the Common Core State Standards at one urban Expeditionary Learning middle school. Sense-making theory (Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002) and inquiry as stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) were used as complementary conceptual frameworks…

This ethnographic study reports on one elementary literacy coach's response to high-stakes testing and her approach to support third- through fifth-grade teachers in a Title I school in Texas. Sources of data included field notes and observations of classes and meetings, audio/video recordings, and transcribed interviews. The findings illustrate…

This paper presents selected findings from a wider study on the expression of health within physical education (PE) curricula in secondary schools in England and Wales. The study revealed that the expression of health in PE broadly reflected ideologies associated with promoting "fitness for life" and "fitness for performance"…

The study aims to investigate teachers' and students' perspectives of how "the formative use of summative test" (i.e., test preparation) may impact student's performance in internal school tests and develop self-regulated learning. It also examines the relationship between formative and summative assessment, especially how they could…

The purpose of this qualitative research study is two-fold: (1) to narrate the realities and perspectives of adult students' learning experiences in a General Education Development (GED) preparation program in a Mid-western urban city; and (2) to document the thinking of the former director of adult education at the state level to understand the…

What is the role of the teacher in developing learner autonomy? The limited research in this area is seldom situated in theory and often based on self-reported data. This study is situated in sociocultural theory and draws on two constructs, the zone of proximal development and imitation, to explain the teacher's role in developing autonomy. The…

In a developing nation like Turkey, the English language plays a significant role in educational and socioeconomic mobility. English is acquired and taught as a foreign language (EFL) primarily in the classrooms. However, the ways in which English language is represented in classroom instruction have been hardly examined and understood. With that,…

The Massachusetts Expanded Learning Time (ELT) initiative was launched in 2005, and it provides grants to selected schools across multiple districts to increase instructional time by at least 300 hours per academic year. Participating schools receive an additional $1,300 per student to lengthen the day and/or year. Schools are expected to use the…

The primary purpose of this twelve-week case study was to explore the use of a cooperative learning strategy with small groups of students in a 12th-grade economics class as diverse learners prepared for tests. The complete case study was based on observations of students, student surveys, focus group interviews, and interviews with educators at…

As English progressively becomes the global language, many native English speakers move to foreign countries to work as English teachers. However a review of the literature reveals that there is little research on their actual performance compared to the non-native local English teachers. This comparative case study examines pedagogic practices of…

The aim of this report is to present the findings of the second phase in a longitudinal study of the impact of changes in the TOEFL® test on teaching and learning in test preparation classrooms. The focus of this phase was to monitor six teachers from five countries in Central and Eastern Europe as they received news about changes in the TOEFL and…

The purpose of this report is to present the findings of the first phase in a longitudinal study of the impact of changes in the TOEFL® test on teaching and learning in test preparation classrooms. Observations were carried out and interviews conducted with teachers, students, and directors of studies at 10 institutions in six countries in Central…