There is a continuing national debate over the efficacy of state-level exams and whether assessments in civics enhances democratic education. This paper uses a large 2012 national survey of 18-24-year-olds to examine the potential effect of civics assessments on civic outcomes. In doing so, it attempts to answer three questions: (1) Do civics…

Beginning with the 2015-2016 school year, the West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE) partnered with the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) and Marshall University to conduct a five-year study of the quality of the West Virginia Universal Pre-K (WV Pre-K) program. The study was designed to examine the effectiveness of the…

Despite Italy's extensive participation in most large-scale assessments, their actual influence on Italian educational policies is less easy to identify. The present contribution aims at highlighting and explaining reasons for the weak and often inconsistent relationship between international surveys and policy-making processes in Italy.…

One urban district in the state of Arizona sought to use an alternative achievement test (i.e., the Northwest Evaluation Association's (NWEA) Measures of Academic Progress for Primary Grades (MAP)) to include more value-added ineligible teachers in the districts' growth and merit pay system. The goal was to allow for its K-2 teachers to be more…

The aim of this study is to apply the jigsaw technique in Social Sciences teaching and to unroll the effects of this technique on learning. The unit "Science within Time" in the secondary 7th grade Social Sciences text book was chosen for the research. It is aimed to compare the jigsaw technique with the traditional teaching method in…

As part of an experimental study on the effects of jigsaw learning on Vietnamese tertiary students' longer term achievement in a course of Management of Education and Administration, knowledge retention after one month was investigated. As reported in our previous papers, students in the cooperative jigsaw group (N = 40), perceived their…

This article examines the OECD's new PISA-based Test for Schools ("PISA for Schools") program. PISA for Schools is part of the expanding education work of the OECD, building upon main PISA to enable school-to-schooling system comparisons. We examine the development of PISA for Schools, the nature of the instrument, and some initial…

Designing, developing, and administering assessments has remained fairly unchanged across the past century. However, recent developments in instructional technology, learning science theory, and advances in the design of assessments necessitate a newfound perspective on assessment. The objective of the present article is to review the topic of…

Although previous research has shown that letter position information for the first letter of a parafoveal word is encoded less flexibly than internal word beginning letters (Johnson, Perea & Rayner, 2007; White et al., 2008), it is not clear how positional encoding operates over the initial trigram in English. This experiment explored the…

Singapore's remarkable performance in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has placed it among the world's high-performing education systems (HPES). In the literature on HPES, its "secret formula" for education success is explained in terms of teacher quality, school leadership, system characteristics and educational…

To illustrate similarities and differences in lower secondary level mathematics teaching with higher achievers and thereby explore privileging processes, we contrast a teaching episode in Baden-Württemberg, Germany with one in South West England. These have been selected from a larger study as typical within each region for higher achieving…

Purpose: Children from low--socioeconomic status families often perform poorly on standardized vocabulary assessments. The primary purpose of the study was to determine whether lexical diversity as measured by "D" (Malvern, Richards, Chipere, & Durán, 2004) serves as a valid measure of vocabulary in at-risk, low-income, predominantly…

Assessment can be powerful when teachers are able to analyse, interpret and use information in ways that enhance their teaching and programmes, and students' learning. A qualitative approach was used to investigate how teachers of Years 4-8 students analyse, interpret and use information gained from administration of the Progressive Achievement…

This study examined the effects of the Success for All (SFA) whole-school reform approach on student reading achievement. The data were collected for the Study of Instructional Improvement by the University of Michigan, which did not previously report the achievement outcomes in detail but did make the data available online. Using propensity…

Schools across the nation are faced with an increased urgency to seek innovative strategies to improve low academic performance of students as mandated by No Child Left Behind Legislation (Friend, 2006). Specifically, in the state of Tennessee in schools such as those located in the Shelby County Schools District who have experienced low student…