This action-research case study endeavors to enhance the summarization skills of first grade students who are reading at or above the third grade level during the first trimester of the academic school year. Students read "twin text" sources, meaning, fiction and nonfiction literary selections focusing on a common theme to help identify…

This "Practitioner's Guide to Growth Models," commissioned by the Technical Issues in Large-Scale Assessment (TILSA) and Accountability Systems & Reporting (ASR), collaboratives of the "Council of Chief State School Officers," describes different ways to calculate student academic growth and to make judgments about the…

The game of rugby is a fast and fluid invasion game, similar to football, that involves scoring with an oval ball into an end zone. The game presents, like other invasion games, a series of highly complex tactical problems so that the ball can be maneuvered into a scoring position. Pugh and Alford (2004) recently indicated that rugby is now…

A graduate student who has an 11-year-old daughter in 5th grade described an incident that underscored concerns that the authors and other professional teacher educators have felt for some time. The 11-year-old had a science assignment to complete as homework. Her parent, attempting to help, offered several suggestions for enhancing the project.…

The expanded use of teaching case based analysis based on current events and news stories relating to computer ethics improves student engagement, encourages creativity and fosters an active learning environment. Professional ethics standards, accreditation standards for computer curriculum, ethics theories, resources for ethics on the internet,…

English language learners (ELLs) in K-12 schools continue to increase in number across the country. In California alone, about 1.5 million students are not sufficiently proficient in English to perform optimally in mainstream classrooms. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 emphasizes the need for highly qualified teachers, but just who is…

According to a study conducted by the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (2002), approximately 90% of universities and colleges of education use portfolios regarding student assessment. Forty percent of universities use electronic portfolios in teacher certification programs for licensing. Because of the popular use of…

Collecting, processing, and using assessment data to form instruction for each student can be overwhelming--especially with so much diversity in the classroom. Help is here, with this hands-on guide that brings together the two leading approaches to teaching students of varying abilities: Response to Instruction and Intervention (RTI) and…

The purpose of this study was to determine what effects synchronous instruction has on students in an asynchronous online art course. Action research was selected as the research method as it allows the researcher to study his or her own classroom in order to improve their own instruction. Data was collected for a period of one month from five…

The purpose of this study was to develop specific rubrics for assessing critiques in English 202, an English as a foreign language course at the Lebanese American University to explore the effectiveness of these rubrics on students' writing and to investigate students' attitudes and reactions to the use of these rubrics. After development of the…

This study investigated the effect of peer leadership on students' cognitive achievement in online asynchronous discussions. Undergraduate students from a large online course were randomly assigned into groups for four asynchronous discussions, with each group having two to three peer leaders. Results of the mixed-method analysis revealed that the…

The busy instructor wants to help their students learn but is often pressed for time. This article presents 6 grading techniques that help the students learn without taking a lot of time. First, not grading an assignment saves time and can still be valuable as long as the instructor carefully structures it so the students still have an incentive…

This paper is about using projects for assessment of student learning in different courses of an Information Systems (IS) program. An overview of the role of educational projects in student learning is presented. The various aspects of defining standardized rubrics across an IS program are discussed. A methodology for the use of such rubrics in…

This study responds to a request from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to analyze National Board certification among high school teachers in understudied subject areas and locales to help fill gaps in the research literature. The authors also were asked to use multiple indicators of performance. The research team selected two…

This article documents the development of foreign language (FL) teacher standards in Uruguay. It begins by discussing what it means to be a teacher, what standards are and are not, and how they can be helpful or misused in teacher development. In the proposal, a distinction is made between teacher preparation programs that are course-based and…