This report summarizes Austin Independent School District's prekindergarten program for the 2007-2008 school year.

This is the 30th Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, 2008. Section 664(d) of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), as reauthorized in 2004, requires that the Department of Education report annually on the progress made toward the provision of a free appropriate…

The 4th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2011) brings together researchers from computer science, education, psychology, psychometrics, and statistics to analyze large datasets to answer educational research questions. The conference, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, July 6-9, 2011, follows the three previous editions…

Part of the third-largest school district in the nation, 77 percent of Chicago's nearly 427,000 public school students are poor, as defined by eligibility for participation in free or reduced-cost lunch programs. Many are members of minorities; many have limited proficiency in English. To make a successful transition to college--even to graduate…

This study investigated the effects of "signals" in text (headings, previews, and logical connectives) on the reading comprehension of learners of English as a Second Language. Subjects were 232 female Hong Kong secondary school students, all less-skilled readers of English. The subjects read a relatively difficult passage in English on…

This study investigated predictors of Harvard University (Massachusetts) student ratings of courses. Data were drawn from 33,180 evaluations of 1,114 undergraduate courses in 47 departments. Predictors examined at the student level included satisfaction with the course, perceived course difficulty, whether the course was in the student's major,…

This sourcebook presents an approach to teaching students of English as a Second Language (ESL) that integrates communicative competence, cognitive and academic language development, and content instruction. It is intended for use by elementary school teachers of ESL and regular classroom teachers whose classes contain ESL students. An…

This book consists of a collection of stories written by adults who attend a bilingual ESL (English as a Second Language) program co-sponsored by the Toronto Board of Education and Chinese Information and Community Services. All the writings deal with Chinese culture but the book may be used by people of diverse backgrounds and of varying levels…

Response latency information has been used in the past to provide information for consideration along with response accuracy when obtaining trait level estimates, and more recently, to flag unusual response patterns, to establish appropriate time-to-test limits (Reese, 1993), and to determine predictors of the amount of time needed to administer a…

We describe the item modeling development and evaluation process as applied to a quantitative assessment with high-stakes outcomes. In addition to expediting the item-creation process, a model-based approach may reduce pretesting costs, if the difficulty and discrimination of model-generated items may be predicted to a predefined level of…

A discussion of the types and uses of stories in second language instruction argues that the inclination to narrate is an omnipresent human phenomenon, whether attributed to nature or to culture. The story is a means of self-expression and communication that describes different forms of narrative, both literary and nonliterary. The uses and…

Three experiments from the late 1970s concerning second language communication strategies are studied for evidence supporting their classification as either avoidance or achievement strategies. The experiments had as subjects native English-speaking children in a French immersion program, adult second language learners of English who were native…

A language camp program that began with a small group of 10- to 12-year-olds whose faculty parents wanted them to retain the German learned on sabbaticals abroad has developed into a program of annual week-long day and resident camps for 150 children, aged 9 to 14 years, learning German, French, Spanish, and Norwegian. The camp was originally…

In order to take advantage of advances in the field of mental measurement, the Armed Forces and the Department of Defense have supported the development of a computerized adaptive version of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) for use in military personnel selection and classification. This report describes the development and…

The manual for administration of the Chinese Proficiency Test contains an overview of the program, including: (1) its history, content, and format; (2) its primary focus and uses; (3) administration procedures, including registration, ordering the test, reporting scores, and billing; (4) the interpretation of test scores based on normative data…