One of the aims of the standards and accountability movement is to make intellectually demanding course work in high school the norm. Significant progress has been made towards this goal. Expecting all students to engage in and succeed with challenging work in high school, however, places on high schools demands they have not been historically…

Inquiry instruction is a hallmark of the current science education reform efforts. Science teachers know that inquiry is important, yet most teachers lack a practical framework of inquiry to inform their instruction. Defining inquiry and assessing how much inquiry is supported by a particular activity or lab can be difficult and confusing. This…

This article describes both the process and products of a cooperative inquiry project between two educational researchers--one from literacy education and one from mathematics education. The collaboration took place in an undergraduate, inquiry-based mathematics classroom in which the researchers sought to develop a shared vision of learning and…

Mandated state testing, college entrance exams and their perceived need for higher and higher grade point averages have raised the anxiety levels felt by many of the average students. Too much focus is placed on state test scores and college entrance standards with not enough focus on the true level of the students. The author contends that…

This empirical study is intended to assess whether a standards-based integrated teacher preparation curriculum is more beneficial in developing professional competencies than a traditional course-oriented curriculum at a college of education in a state university. Using multivariate analysis of variance, we found that students who went through the…

This article retrospectively examines the controversy surrounding the City University of New York's (CUNY's) Board of Trustees and the New York State Board of Regents' decision to phase out remedial coursework at all of the system's senior colleges. Pivotal to this discussion are the ways in which this decision, although similar to many such…

Six physical geography textbooks published between 1901 and 2002 were qualitatively analysed for content and compared to the National Geography Standards. General relationships to dominant approaches to geography, content, and pedagogy of these textbooks were analysed. These textbooks reflect dominant approaches to geography at the time they were…

In the days when university grades were given out as an honest measure of academic and intellectual performance, cheating on exams or papers was a a situation in which everyone was immediately aware that people who cheated were mocking or disvaluing the achievement of those who were acting honestly. Today, all this has changed. It's the cheaters…

In 1999, trustees, led by Herman Badillo, were struggling mightily to shore up the City University of New York, a system beleaguered academically and financially after decades of open admissions. Badillo and his allies enjoyed key successes. "AQ" now has the opportunity to recap that struggle by interviewing NAS member and committed battler for…

Despite general agreement that students should consider more than one way to solve a complex mathematics problem, this practice is rarely observed in U.S. classrooms. In this paper, we examine data that trace the year-long professional development experience of 12 veteran teachers of middle grades mathematics--experienced users of a…

This article introduces the suggested program standards for the next era of NAEYC accreditation and solicits comments on the proposed standards from early childhood professionals. Each standard is a global, evidence- and value-based statement that identifies performance expectations for an area of functioning in excellent early childhood programs.

This paper examines the use of "league tables", based upon "performance data", by the Government to distinguish between primary schools. Data concerning one Northern Local Education Authority, were analysed. It was found that the position of a school in the League Tables of unadjusted scores tended to reflect the background…

According to a February 9, 2006 "New York Times" story headlined, "Panel Explores Standard Tests for Colleges," a new accountability era is descending upon a resistant higher education domain. The story describes the deliberations of a Bush-appointed commission considering imposition of standardized tests on college students. Ten days earlier, the…

An examination of national and regional developments relating to quality assurance and accreditation systems in the three main countries having a campus of the University of the West Indies, Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, provides an appreciation of some of the emerging provisions in the region to respond to the concerns of the…

Recent guidelines for No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB; 2001) permit the use of alternate achievement standards for counting up to 1% of students with significant cognitive disabilities as proficient in adequate yearly progress (AYP) calculations. This provision increases the importance of assessing the technical quality of alternate…