The "TOEFL Junior"® Standard Test is an assessment that measures the degree to which middle school-aged students learning English as a second language have attained proficiency in the academic and social English skills representative of English-medium instructional environments. The assessment measures skills in three areas: listening…

Today's new teachers, with growing frequency, are assigned to teach linguistically diverse students, often referred to as English Language Learners (ELLs) (de Jong & Harper, 2005; Pappamihiel, 2007). Many novice teachers, however, express feeling ill-prepared to work across languages and cultures, and researchers have found that new teachers…

There are many barriers to the implementation of new practice standards. To implement practices that both prepare and inspire their students, preservice teachers need opportunities to enact reform practices: to prepare and be inspired themselves. These opportunities are found in students' content courses, methods courses, and field placements. In…

This study provides an in-depth analysis of whether students who take dual enrollment and/or AP classes have higher ACT test scores compared to a group of their peers that did not take dual enrollment or AP courses. The study also identified the demographic characteristics (ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic status) of students with a 3.0 or…

Recent federal initiatives emphasize measuring teacher effectiveness and ensuring that disadvantaged students have equal access to effective teachers. This study substantially broadens the existing evidence on access to effective teaching by examining access in 29 geographically dispersed school districts over the 2008-2009 to 2010-2011 school…

Supplemental Instruction (SI) has widely been used in university classrooms around the world. However, many obstacles face SI -- including low student attendance, lack of faculty support, and recognition of today's online generation. This research helps to fill the gap in SI by posing to solve the problems mentioned above by extending SI into the…

The Office of Special Education Services (OSES) in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) supports students with disabilities in gaining college, career readiness, and independent living skills through active engagement in grade-level curriculum. The purpose of special education is to minimize the impact of the students' disability, while…

This study looks to better understand how administrators make a decision about a least restrictive environment placement recommendation. What decision processes do they engage in when merging information of individual and environment to create a working plan of access that will benefit all involved? It also seeks the factors that are primary in…

Although most language programs make placement decisions on the basis of placement tests, there is surprisingly little published about different contexts and systems of placement testing. The present volume contains case studies of placement programs in foreign language programs at the tertiary level across the United States. The different…

The Individuals with Disabilities Act of 2004 (IDEA) was reauthorized to include accountability targets to address disproportionality in special education categories. While socioeconomic disadvantaged students were not identified as a target subgroup by IDEA, the goal of closing the achievement gap for all students has been at the forefront in…

Opportunity to learn via public education has origins in the mid-nineteenth-century as a response to Horace Mann's argument that educating girls as well as boys would build a collectively more prosperous society. Over the years, educational reform through the judicial and legislative branches of government has continued to balance opportunity to…

This study investigated the past special education programs and services provided to children and youth who later became incarcerated. Participants in this study were inmates from a medium security state correctional facility in the southwest region of the United States. All inmates involved in this study were identified as having a disability and…

When it comes to pupils in need of special support and pupils with disabilities, Sweden's compulsory school system is sometimes considered a one-track system. This article analyses and critically discusses current policy and practices at various levels of Sweden's compulsory school system for these pupils. The analysis traces three themes at the…

This study explored relationships between placement decisions in English and reading courses and measures of college achievement and persistence for first-time degree- and certificate-seeking community college students enrolled at a large, public, suburban-serving community college in Maryland. Archived records were examined for students who had…

Black students, in general, are underserved academically (Darling-Hammond, 2000; Townsend, 2002) and overrepresented in special education (Donovan & Cross, 2002). Black students with disabilities are further overrepresented in more restrictive educational environments (Skiba, Poloni-Staudinger, Gallini, Simmons & Feggins-Azziz, 2006).…