Four organizations with promising practices in teacher Professional Growth & Support have significantly raised outcomes for low-income students. The charter management networks, Achievement First and Aspire Public Schools, and the two reform organizations, Teach Plus and Agile Mind, have successfully increased student achievement with a…

This participatory action research needs assessment was to empower the students in a large urban research university to explore and to identify the strengths of the program, to identify the needs, and to identify the barriers to student success during their first year of college. Using qualitative methods of Group Level Interviews (GLA) and…

Beyond the traditional notions of intelligence and academic achievement, the successful development of noncognitive or "soft" skills (e.g., personality factors, motivation, creativity) among school-aged youth represents an important objective for any educational system. Such skills have been shown to be significantly predictive of…

The government has assured all Malaysians that no one; both in rural and urban areas; would be deprived of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) development. This calls for a need for teachers nationwide to make necessary adjustments to the teaching and learning process. This paper takes a closer look at the barriers faced by teachers…

College graduation rates often lag behind college attendance rates. One theory as to why students do not complete college is that they lack key information about how to be successful or fail to act on the information that they have. We present evidence from a randomized experiment which tests the effectiveness of individualized student coaching.…

"Monitoring Progress Toward Successful K-12 STEM Education: A Nation Advancing?" (National Research Council, 2013) describes a set of 14 indicators for assessing and tracking the health of pre-college STEM education in the United States. This 2012 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education (NSSME), is the fifth in a series of…

This qualitative action research study examined teachers' perceptions about co-teaching and its effectiveness as an instructional model for students with disabilities. One-on-one interviews were conducted with eight elementary and secondary teachers from a medium sized school district located in Southwest Ohio that has a students' with…

As each generation comes of age they receive a label. Currently, we are teaching the new millennials. Their learning style and time management preferences may respond better to a constant task and feedback cycle similar to the popular Public Television Series, Sesame Street. This paper examines the effects of requiring students to take an…

There is much debate over the impact of high stakes testing as well as a growing body of research focused on both the intended and unintended consequences of these tests. One claim of both the popular media and education researchers is that high stakes tests have led to curricular narrowing--the idea that school time is increasingly allocated to…

A vast gulf in academic achievement separates public schools in Washington, D.C.'s poorest neighborhoods from those in its most affluent. Achievement Prep, which serves 4th-8th graders in D.C.'s impoverished 8th Ward, is an outlier. Yet in 2011, 60% of Achievement Prep's "scholars" scored proficient or advanced in reading on the DC-CAS…

What does good co-teaching look like in an inclusive classroom, and how can a general and special educator build a strong, respectful, and productive partnership? Find out in this introductory how-to guide, ideal for helping current and future co-teachers minimize conflict, maximize teamwork, and ensure the best outcomes for all students in Grades…

Research on study-time allocation has largely focused on agenda-based regulation, such as whether learners select items for study that are in their region of proximal learning. In 4 experiments, the authors evaluated the contribution of habitual responding to study-time allocation (e.g., reading from left to right). In Experiments 1 and 2,…

In a preliminary study, 20 "migrant" Buddhist parents and children from England participated in semi-structured interviews to compare their home nurture with classroom presentation of Buddhism. In the home Buddhism received more time allocation and was presented mainly by the mother and monks--the content being that of "perpetuating…

Test-takers' interpretations of validity as related to test constructs and test use have been widely debated in large-scale language assessment. This study contributes further evidence to this debate by examining 59 test-takers' perspectives in writing large-scale English language tests. Participants wrote about their test-taking experiences in…

The common belief among school librarians is that a flexibly scheduled school library program as opposed to a fixed schedule program is the best choice. After all, there are distinct advantages to the flexible program: students are served at the point of need, skills are not taught in isolation, and collaborative lessons are developed with…