Grading is one of teachers' greatest challenges and most important professional responsibilities. For more than a century, grades remained the primary indicator of how well students performed in school and stayed the basis for making important decisions about students (Guskey, 2015). Traditional grading practices are subjective at best and do not…

We present a logistic function of a monotonic polynomial with a lower asymptote, allowing additional flexibility beyond the three-parameter logistic model. We develop a maximum marginal likelihood based approach to estimate the item parameters. The new item response model is demonstrated on math assessment data from a state, and a computationally…

This paper reports part of an ongoing investigation into aspects of pre-service teachers' geometric knowledge. One hundred and fifty-two Australian pre-service teachers responded to a series of questions that reflect the type of knowledge teachers are expected to know and teach. Analysis of their responses shows that teacher knowledge can be…

The last two decades have seen fast-moving and wholescale changes in the ways that education is now provided in French schools, in the nature of learner assessment, and in the form and scale of system evaluation. Innovation and reform have in part followed international trends, themselves triggered by the global impact of the international…

Using mixed methods, we investigated (a) the association of the extent of English learner (EL) classroom-level segregation (proportion EL) and number of EL English proficiency levels with elementary EL academic achievement, using 2 years of administrative data, and (b) school staff--reported opportunity to learn-related advantages and…

According to Every Student Succeeds Act, schools are accountable for the improvement of all children; including those with disabilities or difficulties, recently arrived English language learners (ELs) as well as long-term ELs, and all students for whom English is not their native language. To meet the accountability requirements, it is essential…

The public narrative surrounding efforts to improve low-performing K-12 schools in the U.S. has been notably gloomy. Observers argue that either nothing works or we don't know what works. At the same time, the federal government is asking localities to implement evidence-based interventions. But what is known empirically about whether school…

Background/Context: East Asian schools receive much attention for the comparatively high achievement of their students. To account for this success, scholars and commentators advance broad claims about the rote character of instruction or the complexity of classroom practice, typically generalizing to an entire nation. Yet little is known about…

Purpose: This study is a quantitative exploration of a new construct the authors label as "academic culture (AC)." Treating it as generalized latent variable composed of academic press (AP), disciplinary climate (DC), and teachers' use of instructional time, the purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of this construct to be a…

The study aimed at identifying the reasons behind the Jordanian students' drop of performance in the TIMSS 2015 from the point of view of their teachers. Survey method was used because teachers are the most able to decide upon the reasons of this fall and so a questionnaire was designed to recognize their point of view concerning the reasons of…

A high comorbidity between reading and arithmetic disabilities has already been reported. The present study aims at identifying more precisely patterns of arithmetic performance in children with developmental dyslexia, defined with severe and specific criteria. By means of a standardized test of achievement in mathematics ("Calculation and…

This paper evaluates the influence of the classmates' age on individual academic achievement. The identification strategy explores a mechanism for the division of classes based on age homogeneity, with cutoff value determined by the Brazilian law of age at school entry. Fuzzy regression discontinuity estimates a local average treatment effect of…

Objectives: We examined the longitudinal relationship between cardiovascular fitness (CRF) and academic performance (AP) among students in a diverse public school district. Furthermore, we determined whether the relationship between CRF and AP varied by student sociodemographic characteristics. Methods: This study used data from 2005-2006 to…

Applied science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) coursetaking is becoming more commonplace in traditional high school settings to help students reinforce their learning in academic STEM courses. Throughout U.S. educational history, vocational education has been a consistent focus for schools to keep students on the school-to-career…

This paper analyzed the costs and benefits of attending the top three U.S. elementary teacher education programs by examining how much emphasis is on general content knowledge (GCK), as opposed to general pedagogical knowledge (GPK), as opposed to methodological pedagogical knowledge (MPK), and how this ratio might have affected student outcomes…