Each year for the past 25 years, the Center for Gifted Education at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock conducts a three-week summer enrichment program for gifted and talented students entitled Summer Laureate/University for Youth. The program was developed to provide a practicum experience for teachers seeking either licensure or a master's…

We proposed a higher order latent construct of parenting young children, parenting quality. This higher-order latent construct comprises five component constructs: demographic protection, psychological distress, psychosocial maturity, moral and cognitive reflectivity, and parenting attitudes and beliefs. We evaluated this model with data provided…

The 9th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2016) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Sheraton Raleigh Hotel, in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, in the USA. The conference, held June 29-July 2, 2016, follows the eight previous editions (Madrid 2015, London 2014, Memphis…

"Differentiating Instruction With Menus Grades 3-5" offers teachers everything they need to create a student-centered learning environment based on choice. Addressing the four main subject areas (language arts, math, science, and social studies) and the major concepts taught within these areas, these books provide a number of different types of…

Teaching mathematics in today's world requires practices and procedures integrated with performance tasks that actively involve students. In this second edition of Designing Rubrics for Mathematics, Eileen Depka clarifies the purpose of rubrics in math instruction and illustrates the relationship between assessment, rubrics, and the National…

The purpose of this study was to increase the comfort level of teachers toward inclusion of students with learning, behavioral, and physical disabilities in general-education classrooms for one high school. Participants included 3 focus groups of teachers with 2 groups consisting of 6 teachers and 1 group consisting of 7 teachers. One…

This paper introduces an evaluation tool prepared to examine the quality of visuals in course-books. The tool is based on Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (i.e. Generative Theory) and its principles regarding the correct use of illustrations within text. The reason to generate the tool, the development process along with the…

The sometimes poor performance of Career and Technical Education (CTE) concentrators on a state-mandated proficiency test is a major concern of CTE educators. This study examined whether (a) there are performance differences on state-mandated 11th-grade math and reading tests between CTE and non-CTE students with similar proficiency scores in the…

This study examined the construct validity of the "e-rater"® automated essay scoring engine as an alternative to human scoring in the context of TOEFL® essay writing. Analyses were based on a sample of students who repeated the TOEFL within a short time period. Two "e-rater" scores were investigated in this study, the first…

The purpose of the study was to examine how reader response journals followed by classroom discussion ("Reader Response Plus") contributed to students' reading comprehension and to their attitudes toward reading. The study was conducted in a rural school in upstate New York. The twelfth grade class that participated in the study…

Learning materials serve as major learning resources for distance learners, and quality learning materials help students learn effectively at a distance. This paper addresses comprehensive aspects of design, development, production, and quality assurance of multi-media learning materials, based on the experience of Indonesia's Universitas Terbuka…

Secondary vocational-technical education programs in Mississippi are faced with many challenges resulting from sweeping educational reforms at the national and state levels. Schools and teachers are increasingly being held accountable for providing true learning activities to every student in the classroom. This accountability is measured through…

This study explored, with both experimental and correlational designs, the roles of (a) authentic, communicatively functional reading and writing and (b) the explicit explanation of genre function and features on growth in genre-specific reading and writing abilities of children in grades two and three. The genres used for this exploration were…

This paper offers an examination of the holistic assessment used for the Graduation Writing Test (GWT) at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona for nonnative speakers of English. Holistic assessment is a widely accepted method of evaluating student writing at the university level for administration, placement, proficiency, and…

An attempt was made to evaluate the standard error of equating (at the mean of the scores) in an ongoing testing program. The interest in estimating the empirical standard error of equating is occasioned by some discomfort with the error normally reported for test scores. Data used for this evaluation came from the Admissions Testing Program of…