The current study applied the person-fit statistic, l[subscript z], to data from a Canadian provincial achievement test to explore the usefulness of conducting person-fit analysis on large-scale assessments. Item parameter estimates were compared before and after the misfitting student responses, as identified by l[subscript z], were removed. The…

The present study sought to design calculus tasks to determine students' preference for visual or analytic processing as well as examine the role of preferred mode of processing in calculus performance and its relationship to spatial ability and verbal-logical reasoning ability. Data were collected from 150 high school students who were enrolled…

In August 2010, the Smithsonian Science Education Center (SSEC) received a grant of more than $25 million from the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) program for a five-year study to validate its Leadership Assistance for Science Education Reform (LASER) model in three very diverse regions of the United States: rural North…

This memorandum describes the SAT participation and performance for the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) Class of 2015 compared with the graduating seniors in Maryland and the nation. The attachment provides the detailed results of SAT and ACT by high school and student group for graduates in 2011-2015. The mean SAT combined score for the…

Background: Few studies have investigated how engineering education admission policies contribute to the underrepresentation of specific groups. Transforming these policies may significantly affect who becomes an engineer. This article reports the outcome of using research results to inform change in admission policy at a Midwestern public…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of incorporating mathematics teaching and integration strategies (MTIS) in a teaching methods course on preservice agricultural teachers' mathematics ability. The research design was quasi-experimental and utilized a nonequivalent control group. The MTIS treatment had a positive effect on the…

Effort to determine teachers' effects on students has been continuously made with national data. However, paucity of research has been conducted on how teachers' instructional strategies impact on student learning with national data, although instructional theories suggest a direct relationship between instructional strategies and learning…

Student errors are springboards for analyzing, reasoning, and justifying. The mathematics education community recognizes the value of student errors, noting that "mistakes are seen not as dead ends but rather as potential avenues for learning." To induce specific errors and help students learn, choose tasks that might produce mistakes.…

Students hold many misconceptions as they transition from arithmetic to algebraic thinking, and these misconceptions can hinder their performance and learning in the subject. To identify the errors in Algebra I which are most persistent and pernicious in terms of predicting student difficulty on standardized test items, the present study assessed…

The intention of the present study is to know how students' performance on number sense based on the components of number sense and also the sub-components in it. The participants of the study are 80 six graders (12-13 year-old) from three different schools that represent the city, rural, and small town areas. The data were collected using the…

The name "SAT" has become synonymous with college admissions testing; it has been dubbed "the gold standard." Numerous studies on its reliability and predictive validity show that the SAT predicts college performance beyond high school grade point average. Surprisingly, studies of the factorial structure of the current version…

This research examined a potential mechanism underlying gender differences in math performance by testing a mediation model in which women's higher anxiety taxes their working memory resources, leading to underperformance on a mathematics test. Participants for the 2 studies were college students (N = 87, N = 118) who completed an anxiety measure,…

We examined the nature of self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism in relation to the motivation and achievement of 306 Korean 7th graders. We also tested the mediating role of domain-specific academic self-efficacy and achievement goals in the relationships between perfectionism and achievement-related outcomes across math and English.…

Do concrete learning materials promote strong learning outcomes, or do they simply make learning tasks more initially accessible? Although concrete materials may offer an intuitive foothold on a topic, research on desirable difficulties suggests that more challenging tasks facilitate greater retention and transfer. In the approach introduced here,…

Achieving fluency with basic subtraction and add-with-8 or -9 combinations is difficult for primary grade children. A 9-month training experiment entailed evaluating the efficacy of software designed to promote such fluency via guided learning of reasoning strategies. Seventy-five eligible first graders were randomly assigned to one of three…