University researchers and teacher facilitators implemented a state-funded professional development project during the 2005-06 academic year to help county middle school teachers improve student achievement in mathematics. In this paper, we discuss lessons and results from this innovative model, whose iterative cycle includes teacher content knowledge, item analysis from a high-stakes test, ped...

The value of experiential learning in agricultural education has long been recognized as an important part of the educational process. Through practice and experience students apply what they have learned in real situations, thus the material becomes understandable and usable. Moreover, in the process of gaining experience, new problems and situations arise causing learners to seek additional i...

Background—The Iowa Department of Education undertook a study to determine district characteristics that are associated with success on statewide-standardized tests. A district profile was created for each Iowa public school district to determine if any association exists between a particular district’s characteristics and the test scores of 11th grade students. Contextual variables such as soc...

BACKGROUND The number of medical undergraduates taking part in Student Scientific Activities (SSA) at Jessenius Faculty of Medicine Comenius University in Slovakia remains low. The aim of this study was to discover some of the factors responsible and suggest improvements. METHODS An anonymous 30-item questionnaire was devised and sent to 245 medical undergraduates (UG) of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd an...

Although the rise in subprime lending and the ensuing wave of foreclosures was partly a result of market forces that have been well-identified in the literature, in the United States it was also a highly racialized process. We argue that residential segregation created a unique niche of poor minority clients who were differentially marketed risky subprime loans that were in great demand for use...

We develop T-SKIRT: a temporal, structuredknowledge, IRT-based method for predicting student responses online. By explicitly accounting for student learning and employing a structured, multidimensional representation of student proficiencies, the model outperforms standard IRTbased methods on an online response prediction task when applied to real responses collected from students interacting w...