Performance assessements go beyond traditional tests and serve as an important teaching tool.

Teachers and students in Lamar County can''t be Internet friends this year after the School Board revamped rules prohibiting them from being friends through online social networks. The Lamar County School Board approved the staff policy against online communication and text messaging between teachers and students at its July 7 meeting.

Blooms Taxonomy Pyramid Bloom's Taxonomy defines six different levels of thinking. The levels build in increasing order of difficulty from basic, rote memorization to higher (more difficult and sophisticated) levels of critical thinking skills. For example, a test question that requires simple factual recall shows that you have knowledge of the subject. Answering an essay question often requires that you comprehend the facts and perhaps apply the information to a problem. I wish to promote the analysis the subject matter, perhaps by having students break a complex historical process or event into constituent parts. I particularly want students to organize and present pieces of historical evidence it in a new way, to create or synthesize an argument. In order to do so, students must evaluate evidence, making judgments about the validity and accuracy of primary sources.

There's much anger circulating around the blogosphere about the comments of Michael Reiss, Director of Education at the Royal Society about how to deal with creationism and ID in school science classes. In fact, the whole thing could stand as an example of how on some issues (of which this is one) people only want to hear an unequivocal assertion of a party line and get unreasonably annoyed (and purport not to understand what they understand perfectly well) when someone says something nuanced or pragmatic.

Give free rice to hungry people by playing a simple game that increases your knowledge.

There was a time when Republicans campaigned on their ideas, programs and values. This year-lacking ideas, programs or values-John McCain and Sarah Palin are running for the White House on an elaborate fictional narrative of victimhood. Their supposed persecutors are Democrats and the news media, and the aim of this whole charade is to keep Americans from talking about ideas, programs and values.

The Harrold, Texas school district calls for teachers to carry guns to prevent a future Columbine school incident. Harry Smith talks to the superintendent and a teacher's federation representative

Researchers at the University of Tennessee list out several myths about learning. The premise that everyone starts with the same base of knowledge about a particular subject, everyone learns at the same pace, everyone learns best by listening, everyone will bridge naturally from theory to application, everyone should learn on his or her own rather than in collaboration and learning is the transfer of knowledge from a teacher to a passive learner results in excessive telling or lecture. "We don't remember information totally; we reconstruct the way information connects to [other] information,"…"That means learners have to reconstruct the interconnectors or forget what they've learned in a short time. The stuff you remember is what you use to make the interconnections." FUN can play a great role in making the interconnections or associations.

With the increasing use of technology in classrooms, it's no wonder that teachers have a growing interest in using YouTube and other online media sharing sites to bring information into their classrooms. Here are 100 YouTube videos that can provide supplementary information for the class, give inspiration, help you keep control of class and even provide a few laughs here and there.

Experts say sites like Postyourtest.com could change the way professors assemble their tests, aware that previous versions of their questions might be available in cyberspace.

Is there a link between air pollution and student performance in K-12 schools? That's what University of Michigan researchers said they hope to discover as they embark on a three-year research project to determine correlations between air quality and performance benchmarks like absenteeism, test scores, and dropout rates.

The state Board of Education voted Thursday to require all high-school students to pass algebra II to graduate, and it agreed to work toward raising other graduation requirements as well. Board members have been discussing, for example, whether to increase the number of classes students would have to complete to earn their diplomas, essentially making the list equal to what they''d need to apply to public, four-year colleges in Washington. That would mean additional classes in English, science, foreign language and more.

They can be popular because they're sweet, they give you a lift and they have hip-sounding names like Red Bull and Spike Shooter. But school officials across the country aren't as buzzed about caffeinated energy drinks as some of their students. They're worried about young people gulping down too much caffeine _ and getting so hyper that they lose focus on their studies.

A vast collection of NASA archival images, video and audio collections were made available to the public this past week. NASA Images is a five-year cooperative agreement between the space agency and Internet Archive, a non-profit online library. When complete, this database will contain twenty-one collections, featuring millions of images and thousands of hours of video footage.

New research published in the journal Science confirms what all of us teachers have known for a long time: girls are just as smart as boys. I hope none of our tax dollars went into that one. A quick quote from the article before I get into the more interesting findings from the researchers: Overall, the researchers found "no gender difference" in scores among children in grades two through 11. Among students with the highest test scores, the team did find that white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one. Among Asians, however, that result was nearly reversed. Hyde says that suggests that cultural and social factors, not gender alone, influence how well students perform on tests.

Faculty members at Stanford University's School of Education have voted to make scholarly articles available to the public for free, a policy change that the university says makes Stanford's education school the first such school in the nation to join the growing "open access" movement in academia.

The Framework for Teaching is a research-based set of components of instruction, aligned to the INTASC standards, and grounded in a constructivist view of learning and teaching. In this framework, the complex activity of teaching is divided into 22 components (and 76 smaller elements) clustered into four domains of teaching responsibility: planning and preparation (Domain 1), classroom environment (Domain 2), instruction (Domain 3), and professional responsibilities (Domain 4).

Scientists will use the information to determine where to look for signs of life on the Red Planet

Not all students are alike. Based on this knowledge, differentiated instruction applies an approach to teaching and learning so that students have multiple options for taking in information and making sense of ideas. The model of differentiated instruction requires teachers to be flexible in their approach to teaching and adjusting the curriculum and presentation of information to learners rather than expecting students to modify themselves for the curriculum. Classroom teaching is a blend of whole-class, group and individual instruction. Differentiated Instruction is a teaching theory based on the premise that instructional approaches should vary and be adapted in relation to individual and diverse students in classrooms.

Five states that made bigger strides than Iowa on national test scores had much tougher standards for what children should learn in school, according to a new study.