Asserts that elementary students should learn economics to prepare for their adult roles as consumers, producers, and voters. Discusses the "Voluntary National Content Standards in Economics" that consist of 20 standards and the respective benchmarks that describe the concepts students need to know by the end of grades 4, 8, and 12. (CMK)

Policy makers are turning away from individual performance pay, favoring school-based rewards that expand curriculum or fund other improvements. Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Texas have adopted performance-based rewards and sanctions. Policy makers must balance state and local control and align performance indicators with school…

This article highlights alternate assessment scoring and reporting in Delaware and Indiana. Delaware's alternate assessment portfolios are scored by two third parties using a multidimensional rubric. In Indiana, lead teachers use a rubric similar to that used in general education assessments to score alternate assessment electronic portfolios.…

The standards movement has caught on in most states, but critics point to a shortage of support for teachers and overreliance on high-stakes testing, which can lead to teaching to the test. Developments in Northwestern states are discussed, as well as criteria for determining how well tests align with standards, and change strategies observed in…

The NASA's Mars Student Imaging Project (MSIP) is led by the Arizona State University (ASU) Mars Education Program, a major partner of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. MSIP is based on the National Science Education Standards and includes curriculum on terrestrial planet characteristics, experimental design, and proposal writing. Three spacecraft…

The authors examined a model of instruction for English-language learners (ELLs) who were learning academic English while they tried to meet content standards required by the nation's education reform movement. In previous work (J. Echevarria, M. E. Vogt, & D. Short, 2000), the authors developed and validated a model of instruction (Sheltered…

The Philippine school system is considered as one of the largest in the world with 41,989 public elementary and secondary schools and 7,790 private schools under the supervision and regulation of the Department of Education [DepEd Fact Sheet, 2005]. On top of this statistics are 40 duly-registered educational institutions called the Philippine…

In this article, the authors aim to present and discuss competing accountability approaches, or models, designed to systematically indicate how a school's students are performing academically. Within the framework of the current federally mandated accountability legislation, increased interest in models measuring school performance has caused…

This paper is the second of two (see pt. 1) that describe a six-part conceptual framework for designing and evaluating digital libraries for mathematics education in K-12 settings: information literacy, information organization, integrated learning, adoption of new educational standards, integration of pertinent changes in educational policy…

Over a two-year period, the teachers at John Adams Middle School wrote and administered eight common assessments across content areas and met to discuss the results of each. By linking standards, assessments, and instruction, teachers were able to identify areas of need for specific students and address those needs. Educators across the country…

Throughout the 20th Century, medicine and law set the professional standards by which all other professions came to be measured. Teaching fell short of the mark because teachers were not perceived as having much control over their professional lives. For example, the professions of medicine and law developed standards boards or associations to…

The article begins by setting out a confluence of events that initiated a proposal to attract students from Taiwan to a new EdD program in Australia, and then explores the tensions and congruities that ensue from this scenario. The main tensions and congruities revolved around issues of standards, quality, English-language levels, profit motives,…

At the core of standards-based reform are content standards--statements about what students should know and be able to do. Although it is "state" standards that are the focus of much public attention and consume substantial resources, many local school districts have developed their own content standards in the major subject areas.…

This is the first of two papers that develop a framework and encourage discussion of research and programmatic concerns on arithmetic word problem solving. The two papers include a comprehensive framework for expanding the traditional three to five sentence word problem into a scheme that assures problems will be of a variety of structures and…

Facilitating participatory processes in graduate leadership classrooms appears to be a natural precursor to students modeling the development of democratic environments in their future work. Doing so, however, might require the involvement of students in a variety of activities heretofore the domain of professors. One example of such a democratic…