Former English Learner students who have improved their facility with English to such a degree that they have been reclassified by their school districts as fluent in the English language are among the best performing students in the state. Because these Reclassified Fluent English Proficient (RFEP) students have much better academic outcomes than…

Whether or not to sort students by incoming skills has been a contentious issue. This brief shows that there are potential costs and benefits to both approaches. Even with the same curriculum, the consequences of sorting depend on students' incoming skills and the outcomes being considered. This brief highlights a critical role skill-based sorting…

Background/Context: Relying largely on high school measures of home language use, the literature examining immigrant incorporation in schools provides contradictory evidence of home language effects on educational outcomes. More recent research has demonstrated that home language use is dynamic and thus it is important to examine the implications…

"Nuu Savi" ("Sacred Rain's collectivity"), the Mixtec people of southern Mexico, had created some of the most complex polities in the continent at the time of European contact. Five hundred years later, they remain cohesive, culturally distinct communities, as increasing numbers of individuals and families migrate to northern…

This dissertation examines three topics in the morphosyntax of Lubukusu (Bantu, Kenya), all of which are concerned with agreement with subjects: locative inversion, complementizer agreement, and alternative agreement effects in subject extraction. Each topic reports novel Lubukusu data which are both typologically interesting and theoretically…

This document covers the data terms used in the "Apprentice and Trainee Destinations Survey, 2010" report and its associated data tables. The primary purpose of this document is to assist users of the report to understand the specific data terms used within it. Terms that appear in the report are listed in alphabetical order with the…

Science textbooks have a major influence on teaching and learning. Teachers and instructors at all educational levels use them regularly not only as a guide for course content and sequence but also in the design of homework assignments and assessment probes. From this perspective, textbook questions and problems can be expected to have a strong…

In this article, the authors address the construct of "academic vocabulary." First, they attempt to bring some clarity to a constellation of terms surrounding academic vocabulary. Second, they compare and contrast definitions of academic vocabulary. Third, they review typologies that researchers and writers have proposed to organize academic…

Rob MacLaury's Vantage Theory, VT, models the way in which a cognizer constructs, recalls, uses, and modifies a category in terms of point of view or vantage. Alongside of VT, there is place for the kind of semantic specification found in the lexicon. VT2 [Allan, Keith, 2002. "Vantage theory, VT2, and number." "Language Sciences" 24(5-6), 679-703…

In one form of category-based induction, people make predictions about unknown properties of objects. There is a tension between predictions made based on the object's specific features (e.g., objects above a certain size tend not to fly) and those made by reference to category-level knowledge (e.g., birds fly). Seven experiments with artificial…

This article draws on the findings from, and the methods and approach used in the provision of a database of Australian PhD thesis records for the period 1987 to 2006, coded by Research Fields, Courses and Disciplines (RFCD) fields of study. Importantly, the project was not merely the creation of yet another database but something that constitutes…

In this article, the author discusses the Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning's (McREL's) Knowledge Taxonomy, which is a useful guide for any educational technology professional development plan. This taxonomy is based on the assertion that teachers need to know not only "what" to do to improve student achievement, but "why," "how,"…

In a study with 79 3-year-olds, we confirm earlier findings that separating the sorting dimensions improve children's performance on the Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) task. We also demonstrate that the central reason for this facilitation is that the two sorting dimensions are not integral features of a single object. Spatial separation…

There is growing interest in the concept of "mechanism" across many areas of the social sciences. In the field of program and policy evaluation, a number of scholars have also emphasized the importance of causal mechanisms for explaining how and why programs work. However, there appears to be some ambiguity about the meaning and uses of…

Analysts of institutional performance have occasionally used a peer grouping approach in which they compared institutions only to other institutions with similar characteristics. Because analysts historically have used cluster analysis to define peer groups (i.e., the group of comparable institutions), the author proposes and demonstrates with…