There is a vital need in the mathematics and science teaching and learning community at the secondary school level for assistance for teachers in adapting curricular materials to meet the many district, state, and national demands and to facilitate high-quality learning of students and their ability to transfer this learning and apply it as they…

In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its fifth report, attributing 95% of "all" climate warming--from the 1950s through today--to humans. Not only did the report--like previous IPCC reports dating back to 1990--accredit global warming to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, but over time the vast…

Common Core is at the forefront of contemporary education discussions in the United States. In the coming years, its adoption and implementation will be critical in defining what and how American students learn. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) raise K-12 academic benchmarks, thereby requiring schools and districts to adopt new curricula and…

This paper investigates how the selected three East Asian countries--Japan, Korea, and Taiwan-- introduce and develop ideas related to fractions and fraction addition and subtraction compared to the Common Core State Standards of Mathematics and EngageNY. Looking at curricular approaches used across countries can provide a better picture of what…

Formative assessment is the process by which teachers and students gather evidence of learning and then use this to adapt the way they teach and learn. I describe a design research project in which we integrated formative assessment strategies into lesson materials that focus on developing students' conceptual understanding and their capacity to…

In this testimony, the author first describes her qualifications, as well as the lack of relevant qualifications in Common Core's standards writers and in most of the members of Common Core's Validation Committee, on which she served in 2009-2010. The author then details some of the many problems in the 2011 Massachusetts ELA standards, written by…

The 3 purposes of this study were to: (a) describe fraction ordering errors among at-risk 4th-grade students; (b) assess the effect of part-whole understanding and accuracy of fraction magnitude estimation on the probability of committing errors; and (c) examine the effect of students' ability to explain comparing problems on the probability of…

Algorithms and representations have been an important aspect of the work of mathematics, especially for understanding concepts and communicating ideas about concepts and mathematical relationships. They have played a key role in various mathematics standards documents, including the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. However, there have…

There is a paucity of evidence supporting the use of curriculum-based mathematics measures (M-CBMs) at the middle school level, which makes data-based decisions challenging for school professionals. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among three existing M-CBM indices: (a) basic facts, (b) concepts/application, and (c)…

A part of high school geometry is devoted to the study of parallelograms in the context of proving some of their properties using congruent triangles (CCSSI 2010). The typical high school geometry book's chapter on quadrilaterals focuses on parallelograms (e.g., their properties, proving that a given quadrilateral is a parallelogram, and special…

At the 61st National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, two practitioner panels responded to questions about implementing the Common Core in English language arts (ELA) and in mathematics. After listening to their responses, the authors felt that the "Gifted Child Today" readers would enjoy…

The purpose of this case study was to examine preservice teachers' use of the Technology Integration Planning Cycle (TIPC; Hutchison & Woodward, 2014) to integrate iPads into literacy instruction. Analysis revealed two findings related to using the TIPC to plan instruction: (a) Though the TIPC provides a structured approach to planning that…

The creators and supporters of the Common Core State Standards claim that the Standards require greater emphasis on higher-order thinking than previous state standards in mathematics and English language arts. We used a qualitative case study design with content analysis methods to test the claim. We compared the levels of thinking required by the…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English language arts have been adopted by many states across the country in an effort to prepare students for life after high school, whether that be going to college or joining the work force. The anchor standards of the CCSS, known as the College and Career Ready Standards, describe the literacy skills…

The "TextEvaluator"® text analysis tool is a fully automated text complexity evaluation tool designed to help teachers and other educators select texts that are consistent with the text complexity guidelines specified in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). This paper provides an overview of the TextEvaluator measurement approach and…