President Obama has recently raised awareness on the need for our nation to grow a larger pool of students with knowledge in science mathematics, engineering, and technology (STEM). Currently, while the number of women pursuing college degrees continues to rise, there remains an under-representation of women in STEM majors across the country.…

The problem was that the general educational level in relation to the job interview process of first-time prospective job applicants who were clients of the staffing agency had been progressively declining over the years. The issue was having an adverse affect on the placement service, as fewer clients were being offered jobs. The purpose of this…

This study explores how girls currently enrolled and recently graduated from Miss Porter's School, Farmington, Connecticut, define success and the role gender plays in their definition(s). Data were collected from semi-structured student interviews, written responses by the students to a prompt designed to elicit personal conceptions of success,…

Depth and Complexity a set of prompts or concepts, represented an approach to curriculum differentiation for gifted students, that originated from a California Department of Education (1994) document describing educational needs for gifted students. Derived from three sources: (1) a review of Advance Placement curriculum and assessment, (2) a…

This study was born from the idea that valid comparison research can be conducted with students who are placed into and exempt from required developmental reading courses and that these groups do contain students with similar reading ability. This overlooked population consists of students with placement test scores that hover tightly on either…

Within the U.S. public school system, English Language Learners (ELL) represent the fastest growing student population. Many of these students struggle to access grade-level content due to Limited English Proficiency (LEP). Although policy regarding LEP status varies state-to-state, most states impose a short time limit on how long a student can…

The College Board Advanced Placement Program allows high school students to take college-level courses and if an appropriate score on an exam is received, college credit is earned. While the program has had its detractors (access in rural and inner-city schools, lack of diversity, pre-selection of talented students, poor articulation with actual…

Many states require children to reach age 5 by a specified date in the calendar year in order to begin kindergarten. We use birth certificate records from 1999 to 2004 to assess whether parents systematically time childbirth before these eligibility cutoff dates to capture the option value of sending their child to school at a relatively young…

Following Messick's definition of validity as a multi-faceted construct that includes contextual, substantive, structural, generalizable, external, and consequential dimensions, this study examined an established directed self-placement (DSP) system that had been functioning for ten years at a large university. The goal was to determine the extent…

The extensive literature on classroom-based second language learning makes little attempt to situate the classroom itself in social and multilingual sociolinguistic space, in the complex and iterative networks of encounters and interactions that make up daily life. Daily life is routinely evoked and "brought into" the classroom as a…

This article discusses the life of Carlos A. Garcia, superintendent at the San Francisco Unified School District. Garcia was born in Chicago, but his parents shortly thereafter moved back to their homeland of Mexico for a few years. When Garcia was almost 5, his family moved to Los Angeles, where his parents worked in factories and Garcia was…

Inspired by the work of Ernest Boyer and the Boyer Commission, the Scholarship of Engagement for Politics project was an attempt to adapt their demands for research-based undergraduate learning opportunities to the British context through the pedagogy of placement learning. This article explores the project's attempts to make placement learning…

Evidence-centered assessment design (ECD) explicates a transparent evidentiary argument to warrant the inferences we make from student test performance. This article describes how the vehicles for gathering student evidence--task models and test specifications--are developed. Task models, which are the basis for item development, flow directly…

In the last few years, the Advanced Placement (AP) Program[R] has used evidence-centered assessment design (ECD) to articulate the knowledge, skills, and abilities to be taught in the course and measured on the summative exam for four science courses, three history courses, and six world language courses; its application to calculus and English…

The initiation, organization, and management of a mentor program will be complicated. In the end, at the center of a mentor program are people who are eager to help their colleagues and who have developed some skills for coaching others as they encounter challenges and as they grow as professionals. In this article, the authors offer a rudimentary…