Government policies designed to redress social inequality are often evaluated by qualitative methods, which prevents the establishment of a causal relationship between policy objectives and outcomes. Social programmes to broaden participation in higher education have been a feature of government policy in Europe, the US and Australia during the…

Internationally, over the last 20-30 years, changing the procedures and processes of assessment has come to be seen, by many educators as well as policy-makers, as a way to frame the curriculum and drive the reform of schooling. Such developments have often been manifested in large scale, high stakes testing programmes. At the same time…

This case study describes a year-long, tutorial intervention with a disfluent eighth-grade reader. Focused instruction, including guided reading at the appropriate instructional level (4th grade), repeated readings, and home tape-recorder readings, led the student to improve his reading rate by 33% (75 wpm to 100 wpm). Formative and summative…

An effect size of about 0.70 (or 0.40-0.70) is often claimed for the efficacy of formative assessment, but is not supported by the existing research base. More than 300 studies that appeared to address the efficacy of formative assessment in grades K-12 were reviewed. Many of the studies had severely flawed research designs yielding…

Student response systems, often referred to as "clickers" are small hand-held devices which students may remotely respond to questions that are posed during lecture. In this research, the perspectives and lived experiences of both instructors and students who used clickers were examined. Also, the activities used by instructors were…

Many English schools have a homework policy which prescribes how much homework should be set for each pupil each week, irrespective of whether it can be made meaningful. Research recommends "Assessment for Learning" (AfL) as supportive of students' learning, but teachers can find it difficult to incorporate AfL techniques into their…

This article is a self-study of my efforts to put supervision for social justice into practice with teacher candidates. The focus is on my goals and what I learned from trying to supervise six early childhood teacher candidates over one year. As a Korean-born doctoral student, I am an international student working cross-culturally to help teacher…

This is an experimental study on the relative effects of Van Patten's Processing Instruction (PI) (1996, 2002), a "psycholinguistically-motivated" intervention in teaching second-language (L2) grammar, on young-adult Filipino learners of English. A growing body of research on this methodological alternative, which establishes…

Openers, or brief activities that initiate a class, routinely take up classroom time each day yet little is known about how to design these activities so they contribute to student learning. This study uses technology-enhanced learning environments to explore new opportunities to transform Openers from potentially busy work to knowledge generating…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the degree of importance that DuFour's nine characteristics of highly effective schools have on closing the academic achievement gap on the California High School Exit Exam, as perceived by high school principals. The study also examined the strategies believed to be most important in developing…

Constructivism maintains that instruction is more meaningful when it is relevant, social and interactive. Formative assessment has been empirically demonstrated as being an effective form of instruction and assessment for learners (Black & Wiliam, 1998a, 1998b). Since assessment orients instruction and learning, combining student culture with…

In 2006, Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) launched a major initiative, the Top 25 Project, to embed inquiry-guided learning (IGL) into its largest-enrollment courses across the university. These are generally entry-level classes and thus affect many students: 75 percent of incoming students on its main campus in 2010 were in at least one Top 25…

Mentoring and induction programs have moved to the forefront as a strategy for helping novice teachers adjust to the challenges of teaching and develop as effective educators. Induction and mentoring efforts may begin with helping new teachers become acclimated to the classroom and cope with immediate problems, but programs must also assist the…

Educators know that standardized tests are a fact of life. They can produce useful information, but the results often are too late, too shallow or not what they needed to find out. Research shows that administering more and more of these types of tests does nothing to raise student achievement. Instead, if educators want to see real gains in…

It is well established that teacher quality makes a difference in student learning. Since the implementation of No Child Left Behind in 2002, staffing every classroom with a high-quality teacher has been an official national priority. That goal entails an implicit requirement to assess teacher and teaching quality more rigorously than has been the…