Extended time is one of the most common testing accommodations provided to students with disabilities. It is also controversial; critics of extended time accommodations argue that extended time is used too readily, without concern for how it changes the skills measured by tests, leading to scores that cannot be compared fairly with those of other…

Purpose/Objectives: Schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) receive a portion of their annual federal funding as commodity entitlement foods--now called USDA Foods--rather than cash payments. Due to rising food prices in recent years, it has been recommended that schools compare the costs and benefits of commodity and…

Reported here is one part of the nationally representative, "Schools and Continuing Professional Development in England--State of the Nation" research study which was funded by the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA). This paper sets out to understand how teachers and school leaders in England perceive the benefits and…

This study explored mathematics teachers' instructional practices in the context of high-stakes testing. Data were obtained from a survey instrument given to a stratified sample of Mississippi and Tennessee teachers who teach the same content tested on their state's high school graduation examination. An analysis showed teachers using a balance of…

This paper analyses the change and innovation strategies that Charles Sturt University (CSU) used from 2007 to 2009 during the implementation and mainstreaming of an open source learning management system (LMS), Sakai, named locally as "CSU Interact". CSU was in January 2008 the first Australian University to implement an open source…

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems can represent one of the largest investments of human and financial resources by a higher education institution. They also bring a significant process reengineering aspect to the institution and the associated implementation project through the integration of compiled industry best practices into the…

Pre-service teacher degree programs are increasingly crowded with subjects covering the wide gamut of knowledge a teacher requires. Ensuring musical knowledge and language for classroom teaching poses a difficult problem for teacher educators. This article examines the challenges of including in the pre-service classroom teaching program a music…

High-stakes testing plays a critical role in education today in the United States. Every state uses a high-stakes test to comply with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate. While many believe high-stakes testing is an acceptable and accurate way to measure students' learning, one has to ask whether high stakes testing is an effective measurement…

Children are more impaired than adults by unfavorable listening conditions such as reverberation and noise. Nevertheless, the acoustical conditions in classrooms often do not fit the specific needs of young listeners. This field study aimed to analyze the effects of classroom reverberation on children's performance and well-being at school.…

It is proposed from this study that engaging productively with others to achieve change has never been more critical in educational environments, such as universities. Via semi-structured interviews with a cohort of senior leaders from one Australian university, this paper explores their perceptions of the key issues and challenges facing them in…

Educational expectations are psychological constructs that change over time and can be altered or influenced by various factors. The concept of educational expectations refers to how much schooling students realistically believe that they will complete. These expectations are eventually raised or lowered as students see others like themselves…

The purpose of this article is to examine the authors' experiences while trying to enter and engage local communities in bottom-up literacies through participatory action research (PAR) toward the community's own collective self-development. In trying to enter five different communities, I have found several challenges and roadblocks such as…

Aiming to elucidate the relationship between social capital and intergenerational practice within mentoring, this article presents data from a case study of the School Volunteer Program in Western Australia. Drawing on situated learning theory and the concept of community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Wenger, McDermott, &…

This paper reports on a qualitative interview study with eleven pre-service primary teachers in Queensland about their career plans, exploring whether, and how, a global imagination motivates this next generation of teachers. The study is framed within sociological theory of globalisation, with regard to the growing possibilities for international…

In this study, eleven K-8 mathematics urban interns' perceptions of their mentoring support systems and factors that influenced their ability to teach mathematics were examined. Semi-structured interviews revealed that district and grade-level campus mentors provided the greatest amount of mathematics instruction and pedagogically based support to…