This qualitative study examined elementary and middle school students' perceptions of assessment. Individual interviews were conducted with 64 students, with questions focused on their emotional reactions and thinking about classroom and large-scale assessment as related to goal orientation, self-regulation, attributions, and self-efficacy.…

This mixed-method research study sought to investigate the relationship between middle school configuration and the academic achievement of eighth grade students in English Language Arts (ELA) and Algebra 1. The California Content Standards exam scores of 646 elementary middle schools (K-8) and 1,282 traditional middle schools (6-8, 7-8) in…

This study of fifteen first generation American college freshmen documents their initial semester with a focus on factors and dispositions contributing to eventual success or failure. Students were identified prior to campus arrival, allowing for immediate and real-time data collection as they were experiencing the beginning of their college…

Applied linguists have identified three components of second language (L2) performance: complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) to measure L2 development. Many studies researching CAF found trade-off effects (in which a higher performance in one component corresponds to lower performance in another) during tasks, often in online oral language…

In Learning Networks, learners need to share knowledge with others to build knowledge. In particular, when working on complex tasks, they often need to acquire extra cognitive resources from others to process a high task load. However, without support high task load and organizing knowledge sharing themselves might easily overload learners'…

Over recent years, UK medical schools have moved to more integrated summative examinations. This paper analyses data from the written assessment of undergraduate medical students to investigate two key psychometric aspects of this type of high-stakes assessment. Firstly, the strength of the relationship between examiner predictions of item…

This article compares the definition of "box plot" as used in the "Australian Curriculum: Mathematics" with other definitions used in the education community; describes the difficulties students experience when dealing with box plots; and discusses the elaboration that is necessary to enable teachers to develop the knowledge…

For several decades, the "three-parameter logistic model" (3PLM) has been the dominant choice for practitioners in the field of educational measurement for modeling examinees' response data from multiple-choice (MC) items. Past studies, however, have pointed out that the c-parameter of 3PLM should not be interpreted as a guessing…

Multiplayer online games form complex semiotic ecologies that include game-generated texts, player-to-player communication and collaboration, and associated websites that support in-game play. This article describes an exploratory study of the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) "World of Warcraft" ("WoW"), with specific…

The common core state standards, which have now been adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia, were designed around the goal of ensuring college and career readiness for all students. In this article, Rothman discusses research showing that a large proportion of U.S. high school graduates are ill-prepared to succeed in college or a…

Students are put in the role of a manager who watches inventory levels decrease and must order at the right time and in the right quantity to minimize costs. This interactive game requires the students to race against time and has levels of increasing difficulty. It introduces the students to the concepts of holding cost, ordering cost, backlog…

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) demonstrate consistent comprehension problems. The present study investigated whether these problems are driven primarily by structural complexity or length. A picture-sentence matching task was presented to 30 children: (1) 10 children with SLI, (2) 10 comprehension-matched children with typical…

Traditionally, women and minorities have not been fully represented in science and engineering. Numerous studies have attributed these differences to gaps in science achievement as measured by various standardized tests. Rather than describe mean group differences in science achievement across multiple cultures, this study focused on an in-depth…

Using a novel variant of dichotic selective listening, we examined the control of auditory selective attention. In our task, subjects had to respond selectively to one of two simultaneously presented auditory stimuli (number words), always spoken by a female and a male speaker, by performing a numerical size categorization. The gender of the…

In this article, the author introduces a social studies lesson that allows students to learn history and practice reading skills, critical thinking, and writing. The activity is called History Scene Investigation or HSI, which derives its name from the popular television series based on crime scene investigations (CSI). HSI uses discovery learning…