This piece highlights the response of APA Division 15 to a recent Time magazine cover story on America's teachers.
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We used data from the 1998–99 and 2010–11 kindergarten cohorts of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study to contrast teaching and learning in kindergarten pre- and post-NCLB. Findings show that, post-NCLB, kindergartners were taught more rigorous content but spent less time on art, pretend play, and child-led exploration and more time on teacher-directed instruction and worksheets.
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In a recent article the authors use data from Missouri to show that differences between traditional teacher preparation programs, measured in terms of the effects of their graduates on student achievement, are smaller than has been suggested by previous research in other states. Indeed, they find that most programs in Missouri are statistically indistinguishable from one another. The authors identify a technical error made in previous work to which they attribute their discrepant findings. In short, some previous studies have failed to properly account for teacher sampling, and in doing so, have overstated the extent to which graduates from different teacher preparation programs truly differ. This commentary considers the implications of this result in the context of the current policy push for more rigorous evaluations of teacher preparation programs.
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For the past two years, Hawaii has been focused on establishing a statewide early learning system based on readying children for school. As part of the process, there has been a push for a so-called "public-private solution" where public funds will be routed to private programs in order to “ready” the children within the state. This commentary discusses the amendment, advocacy for the amendment, and the related consequences.
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The exploratory study presented in this article seeks to contribute to knowledge about test design and construction by focusing on the gap between context characteristics and student performance. The authors address two key questions: What are the characteristics of contexts used in the PISA science items? And what are the relationships between different context characteristics and student performance?
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This article discusses four facets of the PISA program: (a) the issue of the comparability of the cognitions elicited by items across national and linguistic cultures, (b) the association of PISA with economic outcomes for nations, (c) the search in PISA data for universally applicable instructional techniques, and (d) the differences in cross-national attitudes toward the PISA subjects and how those affect test scores.
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The authors of this article investigate the relationship between illustration complexity and the difficulty of PISA 2009 science items in the United States, Mexico, and China. They discuss the implications of their findings for systematically developing PISA science illustrated items.
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Two key uses of international assessments of achievement have been (a) comparing country performances for identifying the countries with the best education systems and (b) generating insights about effective policy and practice strategies that are associated with higher learning outcomes.
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The controversy over the Common Core is the most recent diversion from addressing the basic problems that contribute to the achievement gap between low- and high-income students. In the past decade, the focus has been on charter schools and testing. An enormous amount of time has been spent on promoting, implementing, and debating these initiatives in the hope that they would somehow narrow the achievement gap, even while poverty persisted and income and wealth gaps increased. These policies, which began with high—perhaps, more accurately, unrealistic—expectations, turned out to be irrelevant to narrowing the gap and, in some cases, reduced rather than expanded opportunities for low-income students. This commentary describes the futility of continuing to rely on “solutions” that do not address the underlying problems, serve only to detract attention from the far more fundamental changes that are needed, and risk increasing current inequities.
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This study examined whether microeconomic mechanisms can explain family and school inequalities and their relationships to students’ mathematics achievement. Multilevel analyses of 2009 PISA data from 475,760 fifteen-year-olds in 65 countries showed that students had lower mathematics achievement in countries with greater family inequality or school inequalities (of educational materials, teacher quality, or rich vs. poor schoolmates).
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