People learn from prior experiences. We first learn how to use a spoon and then know how to use a different size of spoon. We first learn how to sew and then learn how to embroider. Transferring knowledge from one situation to another related situation often increases the speed of learning. This observation is relevant to human learning, as well…

Student performance on high stakes testing in secondary education has contributed to the need for students' testing potential to be identified before entering high school. There is evidence to suggest that a greater understanding of how earlier test scores predict later test scores will help educators and school officials increase student…

This thesis explores how predictions about upcoming language inputs are computed during real-time language comprehension. Previous research has demonstrated humans' ability to use rich contextual information to compute linguistic prediction during real-time language comprehension, and it has been widely assumed that contextual information can…

Policymakers and school administrators have embraced value-added models of teacher effectiveness as tools for educational improvement. Teacher value-added estimates may be viewed as complicated scores of a certain kind. This suggests using a test validation model to examine their reliability and validity. Validation begins with an interpretive…

Today, as many as 25 to 40 percent of students who attend college qualify for some form of remedial education program provided by postsecondary institutions (Kaye, Lord, Bottoms, Presson, & Cornet, 2006). Many colleges and universities view the inclusion of remediation as an integral part of their educational mission. However, the costs of…

The purpose of this study is to review the literature on the most accurate indicators of students at risk of dropping out of high school. We used Relative Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis to compare the sensitivity and specificity of 110 dropout flags across 36 studies. Our results indicate that 1) ROC analysis provides a means to compare…

Constructivist instruction has been implemented in the current instructional innovation in Singapore. Large scale survey study was conducted to examine the roles of teacher efficacy in implementing the innovative constructivist instruction. The results showed that the positive correlation between teacher efficacy and constructivist instruction was…

Legislators considering large scale school choice proposals want information on more than likely schooling outcomes. They look to their fiscal bureaus and economic studies to provide that information. The fiscal notes that must accompany all proposals with revenue or expenditure implications are especially important. Often, fiscal notes must be…

The primary aim of the present study was to examine the way in which instructional and emotional aspects of teacher support combined to predict children's engagement in learning-related activities in kindergarten classrooms that served a socio-economically diverse population of children. Observations were conducted on teachers and children in 45…

The objective of this secondary analysis was to evaluate the utility of several participant adherence indicators for predicting changes in clinical, anthropometric, dietary, fitness, and physical activity (PA) outcomes in a lifestyle intervention, HUB City Steps, conducted in a southern, African American cohort in 2010. HUB City Steps was a…

In this article we examine how secondary school students think about functional relationships. More specifically, we examined seven students' intuitive knowledge in regards to representing two real-world situations with functions. We found students do not tend to represent functional relationships with coordinate graphs even though they are able…

We studied the transition from elementary to middle school for 74 fifth-grade students. Specifically, we examined how behavioral risk evident in the elementary years, as measured by the "Student Risk Screening Scale" (SRSS), impacts students transitioning from elementary to middle school. First, we examined how student risk status shifts…

This study investigates how syntactic complexity affects speaking performance in first (L1) and second language (L2) in terms of speaking fluency. Participants (30 Dutch native speakers with an average to advanced level of English) performed two speaking experiments, one in Dutch (L1) and one in English (L2). Syntactic complexity was…

In light of emerging evidence suggesting that the affective quality of parent-child relationships may relate to individual differences in young children's executive functioning (EF) skills, the aim of this study was to investigate the prospective associations between attachment security in toddlerhood and children's EF skills in kindergarten.…

The simple view of reading proposes that reading comprehension is the product of word reading and language comprehension. In this study, we used the simple view framework to examine the early prediction of reading comprehension abilities. Using multiple measures for all constructs, we assessed word reading precursors (i.e., letter knowledge,…