Before nursing graduates can practice as a registered nurse, they must successfully pass the National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses (NCLEX-RN). Low first-time pass rates on this high-stakes test can cause concern for multiple stakeholders including graduate nurses, nursing programs, health care organizations, and society. The…

An administrative rule allowed students who failed an exam to retake it shortly after, triggering strong `teach to the test' incentives to raise these students' test scores for the retake. We develop a model that accounts for truncation and find that these students score 0.14 standard deviations higher on the retest. Using a regression…

Is public housing bad for children? Critics charge that public housing projects concentrate poverty and create neighborhoods with limited opportunities, including low-quality schools. However, whether the net effect is positive or negative is theoretically ambiguous and likely to depend on the characteristics of the neighborhood and schools…

Federal law requires states and school districts to institute accountability systems that report disaggregated student data to ensure that all children make academic progress. However, one of the mandated categories for disaggregation -- English Learner (EL) -- is reported as a single group despite representing students who are beginning,…

The Education Equality Index (EEI), created through a unique collaboration of GreatSchools and Education Cities, is a nationally comparative measure that looks at how well students from low-income families are achieving in schools, cities, and states across the country and The EEI taps GreatSchools' national school information database and…

Despite common conceptions, evidence on whether No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has had adverse effects for low achieving students is mixed. We hypothesize that the incentive to shift attention away from the lowest achieving students increases with the rigor of state standards. Using panel data from students in North Carolina, we exploit two natural…

When New York state released the first results of the exams under the Common Core State Standards, many wrongly believed that the results showed dramatic declines in student achievement. A closer look at the results showed that student achievement may have increased. Another lesson from the exams is that states need to closely coordinate new data…

The academic achievement gap is a persistent and pernicious educational challenge confounded with race and socioeconomic status. The achievement gap persists despite over three decades of interventions and federal, state, and local policies and initiatives meant to close it. We examine the achievement gap in one of the most diverse states in the…

Certain stereotypes can be associated with people from different countries. For example, the Italians are expected to be emotional, the Germans functional, and the Chinese hard-working. In this study, we cluster all 15-year-old students representing the 68 different nations and territories that participated in the latest Programme for…

Background: Policymakers wish to know what changes must be made to the primary and secondary education system so that when students apply to college they are highly prepared, ready to perform at high levels, and likely to be successful in college. Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to investigate the significance of strong educational…

This study intends to develop a standardized instrument for measuring classroom teaching and learning in secondary chemistry lessons. Based on previous studies and interviews with expert teachers, the progression of five quality levels was constructed hypothetically to represent the quality of chemistry lessons in Chinese secondary schools. The…

This study explored 6th grade students reading of science text on the iPad to better understand how students with varying strengths of comprehending text and current academic abilities interpret text on their iPads. Our study sample compared three students with strong reading scores based on informal reading inventories, standardized tests, and…

The study is a comparative analysis of physics candidates' scores in West African and National Examinations Councils. It also investigates influence of gender. Results of 480 candidates were randomly selected form three randomly selected Senior Science Colleges using the WASSCE and NECOSSCE computer printout sent to the schools, transformed using…

We examine edTPA (a teacher performance assessment) implementation at one private university during the first year that our state required this exam for initial teaching certification. Using data from semi-structured interviews with 19 teacher educators from 12 programs as well as public information on edTPA pass rates, we explore whether the…

aimswebPlus® is an assessment, data management, and reporting system that provides national and local performance and growth norms for the screening and progress monitoring of math and reading skills for all students in kindergarten through 8th grade. aimswebPlus uses two types of measures: (1) "curriculum-based measures" (CBMs)--brief,…