According to a new study of Milwaukee public schools, student achievement has benefited from voucher-based school competition. A novel method, using geocoding, was proposed for measuring the degree of competition within the city of Milwaukee and, in turn, for determining whether such competition has increased or decreased the achievement of public…

Writing is the ability to compose text effectively for different purposes and audiences. When many of us reflect on our own school experiences, we recall writing in English and history classes, but not in mathematics. Math classes previously relied on skill-building and conceptual understanding activities. Today, teachers are realizing that…

The Commission has expressed concerns about the preparation of University of California and California State University executive compensation and faculty salary studies. In response to the Commission's direction, a Compensation Study Advisory Committee was convened to explore the utility of salary and compensation studies and suggest…

Storing and curating authentic academic literature and making it accessible for the long term has been a time-honoured task of national libraries. By guarding existing knowledge and facilitating its use to produce new insights, national and university libraries have formed an integral part of the research environment, complementing the roles of…

As part of the accountability movement, schools are increasingly called upon to provide interventions that are based on sound scientific research and that provide measurable outcomes for children. Brain Gym[R] is a popular commercial program claiming that adherence to its regimen will result in more efficient learning in an almost miraculous…

The reporting, analysis, and management of adverse events (AEs) provide an ongoing assessment of risk in the context of a clinical trial and enhance the protection of human research participants and the informed consent process. Effective and efficient review of AEs has been a long-standing challenge for Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and…

In the drive to achieve universal primary education as one of the Millennium Development Goals, there is an increasing recognition of the urgency of focusing on teacher education to both meet the demand for more than one million qualified teachers required to achieve this goal within sub-Saharan Africa, as well as to combat the sometimes poor…

Assembly Bill 540 (AB 540) was passed into law by the California state legislature in October 2001 and was implemented on January 1, 2002. Under AB 540, an undocumented student pays resident (in-state) fees at California's public colleges and universities if the student 1) attended a high school in California for at least three years (schooling…

The purview of the National VET (Vocational Education and Training) Equity Advisory Taskforce (NVEAT) encompasses a range of clients and issues across the full spectrum of the VET sector. NVEAT has undertaken a number of activities to gain a better understanding of the range of issues affecting all learners and particular disadvantaged groups of…

The third-year evaluation of the federally funded Washington, D.C. voucher program shows that low-income students offered vouchers in the first two years of the program had modestly higher reading scores after three years but showed no significant difference in mathematics. Students were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups, and the…

First 5 LA contracted with Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., (MPR) to conduct the First 5 LA/LAUP Universal Preschool Child Outcomes Study (UPCOS). After completing Phase 1 (spring 2007) in which the authors pilot tested the feasibility, reliability, and validity of selected child development measures for the culturally and linguistically diverse…

We developed equivalent, alternate forms of easyCBM[R] in reading (n=20 forms) and mathematics (n=13 forms) with different skills reflective of the National Reading Panel (NRP) and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), respectively. We then took three forms to use as screening measures in the fall, winter, and spring so educators…

The restricted time allocated to courses and the immediate need to read literature in English necessitates the teaching of selective reading in many English as a foreign language contexts. This paper reports on one element of an expeditious (quick, effective, efficient and selective) reading course for learners in an English for Academic Purposes…

This article considers the role of reader characteristics in processing and learning from informational text, as revealed in think-aloud research. A theoretical framework for relevant aspects of readers' processing and products was developed. These relevant aspects included three attentional foci for processing (comprehension, monitoring, and…

This study reveals the challenges confronting small, rural "frontier" schools in Montana and the practices that contribute to their sustainability. A Montana frontier school is defined as a school district with 200 or fewer students and its attendant community in a county with five or fewer people per square mile. The researcher…