Since 1983, policymakers and politicians have worked to stave off a perceived decline in the academic preparation of American students. Stubbornly low scores on international exams and signs that many U.S. graduates are ill-equipped for college and the workforce have lent urgency to this perception, and many states have made high-school graduation…

This manuscript explores how the changing policy context of common standards may have influenced the provision of curriculum materials in the United States. Many educational reforms do little to change the nature of classroom instruction, and prior research has argued that this constancy is, at least in part, due to the common use of instructional…

Motivated by assessment of externally awarded grants and internal programmatic practices, we used transcript and demographic data for students entering a highly selective residential liberal arts college between 2002-2015 to answer institutional-level questions about course taking patterns and pathways relevant to Science, Technology, Engineering,…

Understanding large-scale patterns in student course enrollment is a problem of great interest to university administrators and educational researchers. Yet important decisions are often made without a good quantitative framework of the process underlying student choices. We propose a probabilistic approach to modelling course enrollment…

On-campus college students are enrolling in online courses at a greater rate than ever before for a variety of reasons, from needing a more flexible schedule for work to keeping their degree progress on track when on-campus sections fill before they can enroll to utilizing a modern modality for coursework. In order for online courses to help…

The problem addressed by this study was whether a shift toward student control could yield a greater academic benefit in student academic achievement than the traditional usage of teacher control since there is a growing perception the adoption of student-centered education will better support the academic needs of students than teacher-centered…

As interest in teacher leadership has grown, many leading organizations have developed tools and guidance to support schools, districts, and teacher leaders themselves. For instance, the National Network of State Teachers of the Year developed resources on teacher leader career pathways and advocacy approaches, as well as teacher leader standards.…

Predictions indicate that a large majority of the heads of independent schools in the United States will retire within the next decade. Although there is a push for a greater representation of people of color in this position, in order for people of color to be considered, it seems that they are held to a higher standard than their white…

This paper is about the impact of systematic reading selection used to promote English as foreign language learning in adult students. A qualitative action research methodology was used to carry out this project. Ten class sessions were designed to provide students an opportunity to select texts according to criteria based upon their language…

This study revisits the task of case selection in case study research, proposing a new typology of strategies that is explicit, disaggregated, and relatively comprehensive. A secondary goal is to explore the prospects for case selection by "algorithm," aka "ex ante," "automatic," "quantitative,"…

In this commentary, University of North Carolina's associate dean of research and assessment at the School of Education Terry Ackerman poses questions and shares his thoughts on David Thissen's essay, "Bad Questions: An Essay Involving Item Response Theory" (this issue). Ackerman begins by considering the two purposes of Item Response…

This article reports on a case study that explores the views of four EFL program administrators of a university located in central China about the hiring and workplace situations of foreign English teachers. It was found that the administrators as a whole buy into the conventional pro-nativeness ideology with regard to hiring foreign English…

Gains in school spending helped to lift achievement over the past half century. But California's ambitious effort--progressively distributing $23 billion in yearly funding to poorer districts--has yet to reduce disparities in learning. We theorize how administrators in districts and schools, given organizational habits and labor constraints, may…

The present investigation aims to analyze the effect of motivation on students' causal attributions to choose or abandon chemistry when it first becomes optional in the secondary education curriculum in Spain. Attributions to the effect of the family and to the teacher and classroom methodology were found to be common predictors of the choice to…

Increasing and improving the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educational pipeline has been a point of emphasis for decades, and federal policy in the United States has urged high schools to embed new types of STEM courses into the curriculum. As one example, applied STEM courses--one growing branch within career and…