The purpose of this causal-comparative study is to examine the effect of standards-based report cards on the growth and performance of Grade 4 students on the Massachusetts measure of accountability. This study examines the effect of the report card format on the grade level student growth percentiles (SGP) and composite performance index (CPI) on…

Linguistic complexity of test items is one test format element that has been studied in the context of struggling readers and their participation in paper-and-pencil tests. The present article presents findings from an exploratory study on the potential relationship between linguistic complexity and test performance for deaf readers. A total of 64…

Anecdotal evidence from teachers in Western Australia suggested that increasing numbers of on-entry students have been performing at high levels over recent years on the Performance Indicators in Primary Schools Baseline Assessment (PIPS-BLA). This paper reports the results of an investigation into the performance of high-scoring students. Data…

The final regulations of the "No Child Left Behind" Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2007a, 2007b) indicate that a small group of students with disabilities can be counted as proficient through an alternate assessment based on modified academic achievement standards. This new policy gives individualized education program teams the…

Knowing whether time spent in formal schooling increases student achievement, and by how much, is important for policymakers interested in determining efficient use of resources. Using the ECLS-K, we exploit quasi-randomness in the timing of assessment dates to examine this question. Conservative estimates suggest a year of school results in gains…

Individuals with mathematics anxiety have been found to differ from their non-anxious peers on measures of higher-level mathematical processes, but not simple arithmetic. The current paper examines differences between mathematics anxious and non-mathematics anxious individuals in more basic numerical processing using a visual enumeration task.…

Mixture item response theory models have been suggested as a potentially useful methodology for identifying latent groups formed along secondary, possibly nuisance dimensions. In this article, we describe a multilevel mixture item response theory (IRT) model (MMixIRTM) that allows for the possibility that this nuisance dimensionality may function…

This is a description of an educator using a non-traditional teaching method to improve Mathematics achievement in a split-grade junior classroom. The supplemental impact of this action research project guided students to engage in independent investigation across the curriculum. Mathematics test scores to determine grade level, provincial test…

Although reliability of subscale scores may be suspect, subscale scores are the most common type of diagnostic information included in student score reports. This research compared methods for augmenting the reliability of subscale scores for an 8th-grade mathematics assessment. Yen's Objective Performance Index, Wainer et al.'s augmented scores,…

Background: The association between frequent use of certain instructional practices in mathematics and science and learning outcomes in schools in low-, medium-, and high-achieving countries is the focus of this study. It not only looks at teaching practices "that work" (positively associated with achievement) but whether they…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the validity of using bilingual test to measure the mathematics achievement of students who have limited English proficiency (LEP). The bilingual test and the English-only test consist of 20 computation and 20 word problem multiple-choice questions (from TIMSS 2003 and 2007 released items. The bilingual test…

This study examined the effect of journal writing on mathematics achievement in high-ability students in Singapore. It assessed both the cognitive benefits of journal writing (as evidenced through gains in math test scores) and the socio-affective benefits of journal writing (as demonstrated in their personal reflections) as the students learned…

One of the main components of teachers' pedagogical content knowledge refers to their use of representation forms. In a similar vein, organizing concepts logically and meaningfully is an essential element of teachers' subject matter knowledge. Since subject matter and pedagogical content knowledge of teachers are tightly connected as categories…

Objective: This study assessed the effects of unified family and drug treatment courts (DTCs) on the resolution of cases involving foster care children and the resulting effects on school performance. Method: The first analytic step was to assess the impacts of presence of unified and DTCs in North Carolina counties on time children spent in…

The authors examined curricular effectiveness in high schools that offered parallel paths in which students were free to study mathematics using 1 of 2 content organizational structures, an integrated approach or a (traditional) subject-specific approach. The study involved 3,258 high school students, enrolled in either Course 2 or Geometry, in 11…