With the adoption of such initiatives as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Common Core State Standards (CCSS), and the College and Career Readiness Performance Index (CCRPI), there is increasing pressure for students to meet and exceed performance expectations. This is easier said than done, especially given that not all organizational structures are…

Students enrolled in post-secondary developmental mathematics courses hold mathematical misunderstandings that begin before their college careers. Specifically, these students struggle with conceptual understanding of fractions, ratios, and proportions. The Common Core State Standards in Mathematics outline standards for K-12 mathematics…

On Constitution Day 2013, the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) published the "College, Career and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards." The document was written by a team of academics with specialties in social studies education and its disciplines in consultation with state education agencies,…

The reading of complex text has become part of the reading curriculum since the introduction of the Common Core State Standards. However, little research has been conducted to determine the effect of complex text instruction on comprehension and fluency in secondary readers. This study randomly assigned 53 11th-grade US history students to one of…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) have described discipline-specific literacy skills needed to successfully engage with science concepts, and science assessments ask students to use language in many and varied forms to mediate their science thought and actions and prove mastery of content. Yet…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were released in 2010 with an appendix that claimed to outline a research-based case for the standards. In this article, we examine the CCSS Appendix A as a case of research use in policy by analyzing the type of sources the document cites, the accuracy of its claim-citation relationships, and the frames its…

A major influence on mathematics teachers' instruction is their beliefs. However, teachers' instructional practices do not always neatly align with their beliefs because of factors perceived as constraints. The purpose of this article is to introduce a new approach for examining the relationship between teachers' beliefs and practices, an approach…

The addressed question from the interface between theory and teaching practice of constructivism is discussed at the background of whereabouts of the Common Core (CCSS-M) constructivist-based mathematics curriculum. It concerns the formulation of constructivist methodology of teaching, whose existence is called in doubts by US constructivist…

This article discusses funky protractor tasks, which are designed to provide opportunities for students to reason about protractors and angle measure. These tasks afforded opportunities for students to think critically about angular measurement tools, which supported the teachers with valuable insights into students' developing conceptions of…

In October 2023, the California Department of Education released test scores for all students in Grades 3-8 and 11 for the 2022-23 school year. These results represent an opportunity to analyze whether and to what extent student learning has rebounded after the dramatic declines in scores resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and related school…

Frameworks that connect to the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in Social Studies, such as the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies States Standards, highlight the need to engage in inquiry-based instruction (NCSS, 2013). Participation in such inquiry requires students to engage in…

Many are concerned about the large decline in K-12 student achievement since 2019. And rightly so, given what it signals about student learning and later life outcomes. Less noted is the pre-pandemic sustained decline in student achievement growth that followed 30 years of increases. We examine the nature of achievement decline as measured by…

A Common Core expectation of high school mathematics students is to analyze functions using different representations. One type of function to be analyzed is piecewise-defined functions. The author has found most approaches to the study of piecewise functions to be abstract, disconnected from any context, and difficult for students to understand.…

This study investigated the extent to which third graders (n = 84) from predominantly low-socioeconomic status families had access to books matched to their reading levels in their homes. On average, students showed home visitors books that fell within the Common Core State Standards' recommended text difficulty range for Grade 3 (mean Lexile =…

The authors of the Common Core State Standards and publishers of literacy programs focus on an essential aspect of comprehension, the process of drawing inferences. An inference refers to any piece of information that an author does not include in text but expects readers to use to make meaning. Four common inference types are anaphoric,…