This report provides a portrait of children entering Head Start for the first time in fall 2009, as well as of their family backgrounds and the classrooms and programs that serve them. The report also offers comparisons across the past decade of the Head Start program to delineate trends and changes in the population served and the services…

The purpose of this mixed-methods explanatory case study was to determine the impact of a reduced school calendar on student achievement for students in grades 9 through 12 in two rural school districts in Virginia and to explore meanings associated with this change. The study focused on two research questions: how does student performance during…

There is a growing body of literature discussing evidence-based education, practice, policy, and decision-making from a critical perspective. In this article, drawing on the literature and policy documents related to evidence-based education in the USA, Britain, and Canada, I join this critique and offer an anticolonial perspective. I argue that…

Many universities implement programs and interventions to increase students' perceived instrumental social support within the classroom setting, yet to date, no measures exist to adequately assess such perceptions. In response to this need, the current research developed an operational definition of instrumental classroom social support and also…

The strengths and weaknesses of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) are described with reference to its origins, previous research and comments from critics and supporters. A case is made for this allegedly theoretical approach to provide the kind of outcomes focused intervention that psychology and psychologists can offer to schools. In…

The purpose of the study was to investigate how different student characteristics such as gender influence grades. In order to answer these questions, multivariate techniques were used. The data derive from The Gothenburg Educational Longitudinal Database (GOLD), and the subjects were 99,070 ninth-grade students born in 1987. The analyses were…

The purpose of this paper is to define and evaluate the categories of cognitive models underlying at least three types of educational tests. We argue that while all educational tests may be based--explicitly or implicitly--on a cognitive model, the categories of cognitive models underlying tests often range in their development and in the…

This article looks at the evidence concerning performance and progress in the primary school over the lifetime of New Labour's tenure in government since 1997. It examines the claims made by New Labour that the Literacy and Numeracy Strategies have been an outstanding success and have changed the ways that teachers teach. On the evidence of the…

Newton's article (2010) makes three main contributions to the literature. First, it is transatlantic, bringing together literatures that have been dealing with similar problems, using sometimes different methods and certainly with distinctive educational, cultural perspectives. He points out that neither of these literatures has all of the…

After surveying 1,827 students in their final year at eighty randomly selected two-year and four-year public and private institutions, American Institutes for Research (2006) reported that approximately 30 percent of students in two-year institutions and nearly 20 percent of students in four-year institutions have only basic quantitative…

Although much has been said about ergonomics in interface and in computer tools and interface design, very few articles in major journals have addressed this topic in relation to language testing. This article describes an experiment carried out at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, in which 27 Media and Communication students provided…

Satirizes the impact of testing on student well-being. (IRT)

Just as comprehension strategies have helped millions of students learn to read like proficient readers, they can also help students think like effective test-takers. The authors show how students can use background knowledge, mental images, synthesizing, monitoring, inferring, questioning, and determining of importance to understand the genre of…

Researchers and policymakers are increasingly interested in the impact of afterschool programs on youth development. Even though numerous studies have investigated the impact of afterschool participation on academic outcomes, there is limited research on the differential impact of afterschool programs based on students' participation rate. This…

The intention of Performance-Based Accountability (PBA) policies is to foster school changes to enhance student learning and success. The influence of variation in these approaches, however, has not been empirically determined. This article employs a new conceptual framework to describe PBA models and compare them across contexts. We conducted a…