This study examined whether relationships exist between Hispanic fourth-grade students' anxiety and test performance on a state-mandated writing assessment. Quantitative methodologies were employed by using test performance and survey data from 291 participants. While no significantly direct relationship exists between students' levels of anxiety…

This Information Capsule answers the most frequently asked questions about M-DCPS' academic performance during the 2010-11 school year. M-DCPS earned a performance grade of "B" in 2011 and was only six points short of an "A." Over half of the District's schools (56 percent) earned an "A." In Writing, the percent of…

This article uses a Bernsteinian approach to explore, examine, and theorize about an activity in the upper-secondary curriculum within the Swedish Language subject. Based on an examination of the interplay between different educational actors in this recontextualization process the possibilities for pupils with different social backgrounds and…

Recent national and state standards of accountability have focused on increasing student performance and achievement as well as teacher quality. Included in this challenge is the issue of teacher compensation and how it has evolved with the efforts of providing quality instruction in order to improve the performance of students. Texas has…

This internship study was designed to help determine the effect of different management styles and structures, by studying two programs. One, housed in the MS in Accounting program, and the other housed in the Business Internship Director's office, produced statistically different results at the 5% level of significance, in intern's site ratings,…

With trends toward high stakes testing moving inexorably forward, project-based components of Rhode Island's Performance Based Graduation system have been largely overlooked. Existing studies focus primarily on implementation of senior projects (Davidson, 2009; Lorenz, 1999; Mayer, 1999; Nicolini, 1999; Shaunessy, 2004; Singer & Hubbard,…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) represent the first time that nearly every state has set common expectations for what students should know and be able to do. In the past, each state set its own standards, and the results varied widely. And while states collectively developed these common standards, decisions about the curriculum and…

The Common Core State Standards Initiative, in its aim to align diverse state curricula and improve educational outcomes, calls for K-12 teachers in the United States to engage all students in mathematical problem solving along with reading and writing complex text through the use of rigorous academic content. Until recently, most teacher…

The SAT is a national college admissions examination. The College Board provides an annual summary of student performance at the end of each academic year. This report provides a summary of AISD student test results for 2010.

This article, based on research findings, examines the effect of implementing a genre approach to develop writing competency of Year 5 and 6 L2 primary school students. Using action research, the genre approach was implemented over a 10-week term with two lessons per week in a culturally and linguistically diverse ESL class in a South Australian…

Adolescent literacy, or adolescents' ability to read, write, and communicate about the variety of texts they encounter in and out of school, has remained inordinately, and consistently, low for the past 20 years (NCES, 2010). Self-efficacy is a widely-used construct for measuring and predicting student achievement (Pajares, Johnson, & Usher,…

Locus of control, a psychological construct, has been the focus of attention in recent decades. Psychologists have discussed the effect of locus of control on achieving life goals in social/psychological interactions. While learning a foreign language involves both social interactions and psychological processes, the role and relation of locus of…

The current study examines data from students in grades 4-8 who participated in a statewide computer-based benchmark writing assessment that featured automated essay scoring and automated feedback. We examined whether the use of automated feedback was associated with gains in writing quality across revisions to an essay, and with transfer effects…

Portfolio assessment has become the predominant best practice in writing assessment at the college level. Despite its clear superiority to previous methods of assessment, portfolio assessment has brought its own collection of challenges. Although the stated goal of much portfolio grading is to create an overall, or holistic, judgment of a…

This study aimed at investigating whether applying pre-writing strategies would affect the quality of L2 learners' compositions. Twenty three adult EFL students from Jahad-e-Daneshgahi English centre in Iran participated in this study. They were randomly assigned to control and experimental groups, including 11 and 12 participants in each. They…