This is the 17th year of statewide student testing under the Arizona Student Achievement Program. To fulfill the requirements of Arizona law, a nationally standardized, norm-referenced achievement test in the subjects of reading, language, and mathematics must be adopted and implemented for Arizona schools. For the 1996-97 school year, the State…

This report presents an investigation by the American College Testing Program (ACT) of an alternative design for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The proposed design greatly simplifies the data collection and analysis procedures needed to produce assessment results and has the potential to produce results that are more…

The National Household Education Survey (NHES) is a telephone survey of the noninstitutionalized civilian population of the United States that collects data on educational issues that are best explored through contact with households rather than with institutions. The NHES has been conducted in 1991, 1993, 1995, and 1996. In the 1996 NHES…

The sixth session of IT@EDU98 consisted of seven papers on the topic of the learning machine--Vietnamese based human-computer interface, and was chaired by Phan Viet Hoang (Informatics College, Singapore). "Knowledge Based Approach for English Vietnamese Machine Translation" (Hoang Kiem, Dinh Dien) presents the knowledge base approach,…

This document presents synthesized estimates of the rates of level 1 literacy by congressional district in the 50 states and District of Columbia. The estimates are extrapolations of the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS) that were based on the findings of approximately 26,000 interviews. The document begins with an introduction containing the…

These hearings addressed proposed Bill S. 2104 to create a Department of Energy (DOE) fellowship program for math and science teachers that would provide them opportunities to work at DOE labs in order to enhance coordination and communication among the educational community, the Congress, and the Executive Agencies responsible for developing and…

This report presents findings from an evaluation of the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Urban Systemic Initiative (USI) program in 22 large urban school districts. The USI program has supported educational reform in large public school districts that have a high percentage of students living in poverty and has directed its efforts toward the…

The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K), Kindergarten Class of 1998-99, selected a nationally representative sample of approximately 22,000 kindergartners in the fall of 1998 and is following these children through the end of the fifth grade. Baseline data about these children, their families, and their kindergarten programs were collected…

This book provides activities for fourth, fifth, and sixth grade teachers and librarians to use in the spare moments that can be transformed into educational experiences. The activities range from individual paper-and-pencil games, to partner activities, to whole-class ideas, and combinations thereof. The activities are arranged by subject (i.e.,…

This study examined, through a designed simulation of a performance assessment of a typical teaching act, the possibility of measuring elementary preservice teachers' mathematics content knowledge without relying solely on the candidates' performance on a standardized mathematics test. Data collection involved a series of disclosed mathematics…

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has launched the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to monitor the outcomes of education systems in terms of student achievement and within an internationally accepted framework. The frameworks and assessments for PISA 2000 are the product of a multi-year development…

The Bookmark Standard Setting Procedure (Lewis, Mitzel, and Green, 1996) is an item-response-theory-based standard setting method that has been widely implemented by state testing programs. The primary purposes of this study were to: (1) estimate standard errors for cutscores that result from Bookmark standard settings under a generalizability…

This report examined the extent to which student attendance, teacher certification, and teacher absence explained differences in reading and mathematics achievement among elementary and middle schools in New York City (beyond that explained by such student demographics as receiving free lunch, being an English language learner, and receiving…

This paper describes a project for upper elementary and middle school minority girl students called the Sisters in Sport Science (SISS). The SISS program addresses the needs of urban girls in gaining access to equal education in science and mathematics by using athletics as a vehicle for learning. The program provides a non-competitive and…

"Crosstown," the television program featured in this videotape and teaching guide, depicts a teenager who is forced, due to her father's lack of child support payments, to leave her comfortable home four years after her parents' divorce and to move across town to an apartment in an inner city neighborhood. The teenager decides not to be…