| ability grouping | Educational provisions for gifted and talented students usually involve some type of homogeneous or ability grouping, enrichment or acceleration, with acceleration being a long practiced program adoption in the USA (Gallagher, 1985; Feldhusen, 1989). [Lynne Mackenzie-Sykes; http://www.nexus.edu.au/teachstud/gat/mackenz.htm]. |
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| Acceleration | An action used for academically talented students to speed up the rate of school material that students encounter (http://cty.jhu.edu/imagine/accel.html). |
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| accountability | The idea of holding schools, districts, teachers, and students responsible for results and performance. No Child Left Behind Law (2001) specifies accountability through testing. |
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| achievement | Achievement is the outcome of what is learned in schools, and, in this era of accountability as defined by the federal law, No Child Left Behind (2001), as measured by standardized test scores. Yet, the achievement gap between whites and blacks remains wide. |
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| Achievement Test | A standardized test constructed to measure knowledge or understanding learned in a class or subject. |
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| Adaptive Learning Environments | An innovative approach to educational reform intended to meet the diverse needs of individual students with a variety of abilities, experiences, and socio-economic backgrounds through adaptive teacher instruction (http://www.ed.gov/pubs/ToolsforSchools/alem.html). |
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| Affective Domain | An area of learning based on a students' growth in feelings or emotions, or attitudes, as opposed to cognitive domain, and psychomotor or physical skills. (see Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain). |
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| After school | Most extracurricular or after-school programs include games, arts & crafts, dance, or sports. These activities are designed to enhance the growth of awareness, perception, reasoning, judgment, and motor and social skills. |
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| Alternative Schools | Alternative schools present an alternative to the traditional school system for the purpose of creating a different approach to student learning. Alternative schools may be smaller or more limited in classes offered, use a variety of different teaching methods, employ flexible schedules, smaller teacher-student ratios and/or use modified curricula. |
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| assessment | The process of judging the educational value of student work. |
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| At-Risk Students | Students who are identified as being "at-risk" for doing well in school due to poverty, learning disability, language difference, geographic location, etc.
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| Authentic Assessment | Authentic assessment is a process of assessing students in a way that measures student performance in "real-life" tasks and situations such as speaking in front of others, presenting evidence of opinion to a board of reviewers, exhibition of portfolios, etc.
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| Board of Regents | The governing body of a university, or a system of universities, within a state, which performs educational policy-making for the state education system, which may include all universities and K-12 schools. |
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| Building Capacity | The most likely policy for effecting long-term change (Elmore, 1989). |
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| Capacity | The ability to carry out school reform. |
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| Carnegie Units | Credits given at the successful completion of a class or course. A particular amount of these credits, depending on the state, must be obtained by a student in order to receive a high school diploma. |
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| change | The act of making use of or being interested in new ideas, findings, or oppportunities to change, improve or reform schools. |
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| Charter Schools | Charter schools, like traditional public schools, are accountable to the state from whom they gain their "charter." Unlike traditional public schools, they are awarded the freedom to organize instruction in any way that their charter specifies. They must increase student academic performance to earn the relief from traditional regulatory oversight.
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| Classroom Management | Classroom management overlaps with instructional leadership. First-year teachers struggle with classroom rules and students sometimes suffer intellectually under classroom management with only rules. As instruction improves, classroom management becomes supportive, instead of punitive, and learning for all students improves as well. |
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| Cognitive Psychology | Cognitive psychology was Jean Piaget's area of interest. Piaget and cognitivists believe that learning is the acquisition of, or reorganization of new thoughts. Piaget thought that knowledge grows in stages of development. Cognitive psychology was more explanatory than behavorism, and Piaget is still influential in education. |
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| Collaborative Learning | An instruction method promoting the grouping and pairing of students at various performance levels working together toward a common, academic goal. |
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| Concept Map | A graphic organizing and display tool for describing relationships among ideas on a specific topic. |
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| Constructivism | A theory of learning that uses learners’ experiences to construct personal knowledge through the environment and social interactions. |
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| Content Validity | The degree to which the content covered by a measurement device matches the instruction that preceded it. |
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| Cooperative Learning | The instructional use of small groups so that students work together to maximize their own and each other’s learning. |
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