This seven-year longitudinal study examined how children's spontaneous focusing on numerosity (SFON), subitizing based enumeration, and counting skills assessed at five or six years predict their school mathematics achievement at 12 years. The participants were 36 Finnish children without diagnosed neurological disorders. The results, based on…

Research Findings: Children from families of lower socioeconomic status (SES) enter kindergarten with less developed mathematical knowledge compared to children from middle SES families. This discrepancy is present at age 3 years and likely stems from differences in the home learning environment. This study reports SES-related differences both in…

A typical mathematics assignment consists primarily of practice problems requiring the strategy introduced in the immediately preceding lesson (e.g., a dozen problems that are solved by using the Pythagorean Theorem). This means that students know which strategy is needed to solve each problem before they read the problem. In an alternative…

Growing numbers of English Language Learners (ELLs) in the United States have become a trend in recent years; and North Carolina, including the region of this study, is no exception to this trend. As a result of the national rise in ELLs, NCLB was enacted with the goal of increasing academic achievement and closing the achievement gap between…

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is a group of states working together to develop a set of assessments that measure whether students are on track to be successful in college and their careers. These high-quality, computer-based K-12 assessments in mathematics and English language arts (ELA)/literacy give…

This manual provides guidance and documentation for users of the kindergarten (or base year) data of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011). It begins with an overview of the ECLS-K:2011. Subsequent chapters provide details on the study data collection instruments and methods; the direct and indirect…

Component Universe Score Profile analysis (CUSP) is introduced in this paper as a psychometric alternative to multivariate profile analysis. The theoretical foundations of CUSP analysis are reviewed, which include multivariate generalizability theory and constrained principal components analysis. Because CUSP is a combination of generalizability…

This report describes SAT test results for Austin Independent School District (AISD) students in the 2014-2015 school year.

The purpose of the study was to examine gender differences in performance on multiple-choice mathematical ability test, administered within the context of high school graduation test that was designed to match eleventh grade curriculum. The transformed item difficulty (TID) was used to detect a gender related DIF. A random sample of 1400 eleventh…

In this study regression and neural networks based methods are used to predict statewide high-stakes test results for middle school mathematics using the scores obtained from third party tests throughout the school year. Such prediction is of utmost significance for school districts to live up to the state's educational standards mandated by the…

Large-scale assessment programs such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) use a sophisticated assessment administration design called matrix sampling that minimizes the testing burden on individual…

In this article, the authors share a variety of ways to formatively assess basic fact fluency. The define fluency, raise some issues related to timed testing, and then share a collection of classroom-tested ideas for authentic fact fluency assessment. This article encourages teachers to try a variety of alternative assessments from this sampling,…

This paper explores sixty-six students' personal meaning and interpretation of the vertex of a quadratic function in relation to their understanding of quadratic functions in two different representations, algebraic and word problem. Several categories emerged from students' personal meaning of the vertex including vertex as maximum or minimum…

Using nationally representative data on 12,462 kindergarten children, this report examines the link between behavioral engagement and math achievement growth during kindergarten. Multilevel models show that students with higher individual engagement tend to experience larger math achievement growth over kindergarten, that classroom engagement…

It is now clear that the original promise to anchor K-12 education to higher education and backmap the Common Core Mathematics Standards (CCMS) from the upper grades down to the primary grades was empty rhetoric. Higher education has scarcely been involved at all, with the exception of the institutions that agreed to place high school students who…