Washington State is set to spend nearly $100 million in the next two years on pay bonuses for teachers who receive national board certification. This investment is supposed to improve the state's teaching force and encourage the most capable teachers to work in high-poverty schools. Does it accomplish those goals? Governor Christine Gregoire's…

Community colleges typically offer extensive developmental education programs to students with weak academic skills in order to prepare them for college-level coursework. Yet, for students referred to developmental mathematics education, rates of completion in developmental math courses and in college-level math courses required for a degree are…

This report is a descriptive analysis of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), intended to determine which content is eligible for the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium's end-of-year summative assessment for English language arts (ELA) and mathematics in grades 3-8 and high school. The high school standards analyzed were those in grades…

A growing body of literature has provided evidence of the contribution of various metalinguistic skills to children's English literacy development; however, most of the studies focused on reading outcomes while spelling outcomes have been under-researched. Further, very few studies have been conducted to investigate if the results based on native…

The city of New Orleans has embarked on an historic experiment reinventing its schools--once considered among the worst in the country--from a centralized, single district model of education to a two district model in which both the Recovery School District (RSD) and the preexisting Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) both operate direct run and…

This research examined middle school student conceptions about global climate change (GCC) and the change these conceptions undergo during an argument driven instructional unit. The theoretical framework invoked for this study is the "framework theory" of conceptual change (Vosniadou, 2007a). This theory posits that students do not…

Response to Intervention (RtI) is a multi-tiered approach to provide evidence-based instruction to all students. Within a RtI paradigm, teachers and other professionals collaborate to design interventions for students who are at-risk for a learning disability. Despite the widespread use of RtI paradigms in educational settings, few studies have…

The purpose of this study was to explore the success of the Freshmen Academy as it relates to student success. A decrease in discipline referrals, improved attendance, passing the end-of-course exams and promotion to the tenth grade is the quantifiable measures that measure the success of the Freshmen Academy. The Freshmen Academy is designed with…

This dissertation presents an instrumental study of variation in fricative voicing in Buenos Aires Spanish (BAS), particularly with respect to the devoicing change of the postalveolar fricative: /y/greater than/[function of]/. It proposes a novel way of determining the completion of this change by comparing the percentage voicing of the…

Developing a cognitive model of task performance is an important and often overlooked phase in assessment design; failing to establish such a model can threaten the validity of the inferences made from the scores produced by an assessment (e.g., Leighton, 2004). Conducting think aloud interviews (TAIs), where students think aloud while completing…

Universities UK's response to the Higher Education White Paper outlines the principles that we believe will underpin a strong future higher education system. These principles form the basis of the specific recommendations we make to government in taking forward a programme of change. They also form the backdrop to our own commitments, which…

Anecdotal evidence from teachers in Western Australia suggested that increasing numbers of on-entry students have been performing at high levels over recent years on the Performance Indicators in Primary Schools Baseline Assessment (PIPS-BLA). This paper reports the results of an investigation into the performance of high-scoring students. Data…

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), through the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC), developed standards for the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for effective practice by educational leaders (CCSSO, 1996). These standards provide a viable content domain from which to assess leader cognitive and…

This study evaluated the efficacy of "Above the Influence" (ATI), a national media-based health persuasion campaign to deter youth drug use. The campaign uses public service anti-drug prevention messages and targets youth between the ages of 14 and 16, a period of heightened susceptibility to peer influences. The evaluation utilized mall…

Enrollment increases at many institutions have forced science faculty to reevaluate assessment decisions in light of increasing demands on time. Some have advocated the replacement of free-response examinations with forced-choice examinations as a time-saving strategy. The existing research literature contains many studies comparing student…