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Many schools-—especially ones in low-income areas—-have realized that there's a more efficient input towards the goal of maximizing testing performance than teaching academic subjects in a way that is rigorous and meaningful. This more efficient input is—test taking strategies! Strategic test-taking involves a different set of actions than does reading and enjoying a chapter book—or reading, enjoying, and writing about ...more »

Many psychometricians have argued that certain forms of preparation lead to "test score pollution"—that is, they invalidate the results of standardized tests. (All sorts of studies showing this were done in the early '90s; in the current educational climate, this is a forgotten issue.) Nevertheless, many schools see the implementation of K-12 commercial test preparation curriculums as a more immediately efficacious ...more »

I work in a English comprehensive school, we set out children from year 7 to 11 and this works really well. It allows the teacher to plan lessons according to the ability of the students in the class. we only set for the main classes which are English, Maths and Science, the rest of the lessons are taken as a working group in KS3 and then options in KS4. just wondered what you thought of our way of educating the students. ...more »

More and more coures/degrees are being offered online. However, most course content remains a mixture of text and hyperlinks. Funds are needed for colleges to develop high quality digital, interactive content. Software programs that allow instructors to create digital content is often too expensive for colleges to purchase. Also, instructors do not have the skill sets required to develop content using these programs. ...more »

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act Section 508 colleges are required to offer online courses/degrees that meet these guidelines. However, this requires expensive HTML programming and in many cases redesigning of current content. Assistive technologies such as JAWS are very exoensive yet needed in the development of accessble content. Some states such as North Carolina have additional laws, NC Senate Bill ...more »

In response to Adam M. Smith's suggestion for "chunks" of instruction materials instead of entire on-line books, there is already something like this available, called Advanced Distributed Learning, which is run by ADL CoLabs, in the federal government: http://www.adlnet.gov

There are not enough characters for me to tell all that is wrong with this, but I will do my best. First of all this so called document needs to be scrapped or several ammendments need to be added. My grandchildren are going through the same school system that my grown children went through. There is no way a teacher can provide a lesson plan that is compatible for the whole class the way it is. There are advanced, ...more »

I've thought for many years that it's very odd how we make kids advance one year at a time in all subjects regardless of how they're doing on any individual one. And then, if worse comes to worse, we keep them back a whole grade, or move them forward even though they haven't mastered the material. In real life, we don't couple all kinds of tasks and rewards that aren't logically linked. The over-broad nature of year-long ...more »

https://innovation.ed.gov/ The Portal site has more features, and no plans to curtail or cease operations (this site stops accepting submissions on March 19, 2010)... From the Portal's homepage: "The Department of Education has developed this Portal as an online forum where key stakeholders in education can share their innovative ideas and collaborate to turn those ideas into a new reality. By connecting an idea from ...more »

I feel standards of physical fitness and wellness should be publicized for school districts. Identifying some goals for flexibility, endurance, cardiovascular capacity and strength would give districts real targets for children at various stages and ages. Too often the emphasis is on sports, but a focus on wellness and fitness would benefit a broader group as well as be cheaper overall. Basic calisthenics, bodyweight ...more »

I feel that Teen Driving Programs should be supported by the Georgia lottery and be put into action just as The Lottery supports the beginning of a child's education, so should preparation for leaving school be implemented.

This would save lots of lives and reduce accidents by offering educational driving skills and not learning from mistakes and unsafe manuevering that the parents may teach.

I think we need a FIPSE proposal for dual degree/certificates/mobility and/or elearning arrangements with universities in India.