Practice Quiz


1	In her study of middle-school classes, Frances Spielhagen found that
	A)	the older students were more likely to prefer such classes than were the younger students.
	B)	only a minority of the students chose to enroll in single-sex classes.
	C)	the students enrolled in such classes felt that there were few, if any, academic benefits for them.
	D)	the girls indicated that they were less intimidated about speaking up in the girls-only classroom than they had been in coeducational classes.



2	Jo Sanders and Sarah Cotton Nelson point out that, on average, boys are more likely than girls to take AP (Advanced Placement) exams in all academic subjects, including physics and English.
	A)	True
	B)	False



3	Jon Lorence and Anthony Dworkin, who argue that there can be persistent positive effects of retention on academic performance over time, contend that one major explanation for the positive effects of grade retention they observe in their research is:
	A)	the amount of parental involvement during the repeated grade.
	B)	the nature of instructional practices during the repeated grade.
	C)	the student gains another year chronologically during the repeated grade.
	D)	the exposure to the same or similar curricular material during the repeated grade.



4	Nancy Frey, who argues against retention, concludes that 30 years of research evidence show that retention is
	A)	academically ineffective.
	B)	socially and emotionally detrimental.
	C)	associated with adverse postsecondary opportunities.
	D)	all of the above.



5	In his review of research, Keith Baker, who believes that English Immersion should replace bilingual education, asserts that
	A)	bilingual education leads to better academic achievement than does English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction.
	B)	students in bilingual education do equally well academically as do students in Structured English Immersion.
	C)	ESL instruction leads to better academic achievement than does bilingual education.
	D)	the negative effects of bilingual education on students cannot be undone.



6	According to Josephine Arce, who does not believe that English Immersion should replace bilingual education, proponents of Structured English Immersion
	A)	want to restrict “access” to English only to those in the dominant culture.
	B)	ignore the interdependence of culture and language.
	C)	are driven by a misplaced desire to help immigrants share in the “American dream.”
	D)	hope to help immigrants maintain their ethnic heritage and identity.



7	A student with a disability is given more time to complete the same math test than his peers without disabilities. According to Michael Giangreco, this is an example of what type of inclusive practice?
	A)	program
	B)	support
	C)	multilevel curriculum
	D)	curriculum overlapping



8	According to James Kauffman and his colleagues, the disability rights movement has
	A)	reduced the role of parents in educational decisions.
	B)	led to a renewed appreciation for the great value of special education services.
	C)	decreased efforts to “normalize” people with disabilities.
	D)	decreased the use of accommodations for students with disabilities enrolled in regular education classrooms.



9	In summarizing the National Assessment of Educational Progress Report, William J. Mathis points out that reading and math achievement scores have improved more for white students than for ethnic and racial minority students between 2000 and 2005.
	A)	True
	B)	False



10	According to Carol Corbett Burris and Kevin G. Welner, most Americans believe that the achievement gap between white and ethnic and racial minority students is due to factors unrelated to the quality of the schooling that the children receive.
	A)	True
	B)	False



11	With which one of the following statements would Robert Sylwester, who believes that schools should try to increase students’ self-esteem, agree?
	A)	Praise makes students complacent and unwilling to strive for higher levels of performance.
	B)	Although praise can lead to greater self-esteem, it can also have negative side effects, such as increased impulsiveness.
	C)	Children who have low self-esteem are born with lower levels of serotonin, and nothing can change that.
	D)	Students’ experiences affect their behavior by altering their brain chemistry.



12	Carol S. Dweck, who does not believe that schools should try to increase students’ self-esteem, argues that
	A)	teachers should assign students easy tasks so that they can be successful.
	B)	students who receive no praise will produce the highest-quality work.
	C)	teachers should praise students for being intelligent and not for the correctness of their answers on particular tasks.
	D)	students who are praised for being intelligent will be fearful of and avoid difﬁcult academic tasks.



13	Thomas Lickona, who believes that moral education should be part of the school curriculum, argues that
	A)	moral education should encourage students to think about moral issues because moral thinking inevitably leads to moral action.
	B)	morality should be a matter of personal judgment or conscience and not a subject for public debate.
	C)	moral education should target the cognitive side of morality and ignore the emotional side.
	D)	even public schools should encourage students to use their religious faith to help them think about moral issues.



14	On which one of the following assumptions does Alﬁe Kohn, who does not believe that moral education should be part of the school curriculum, contend that the character education movement is based?
	A)	Political and economic factors are the cause of most social problems, including crime and other misbehavior by children.
	B)	The best citizen is one who questions authority and wants to know the basis of laws and rules.
	C)	Most behavior problems are the result of sheer willfulness on the part of children.
	D)	Children should be taught the values of their culture, which means that any educational program may need to teach different values to different children.



15	Tashawna K. Duncan, Kristen M. Kemple, and Tina M. Smith, who believe that reinforcement facilitates learning, argue that reinforcement
	A)	typically leads to increases in the frequency of undesirable behaviors.
	B)	lowers intrinsic motivation to perform the reinforced behavior.
	C)	can increase the frequency of desirable behaviors but cannot decrease the frequency of undesirable behaviors.
	D)	is useful when a child is not intrinsically motivated to perform the desired behavior on his or her own.



16	Charles H. Wolfgang, who does not believe that reinforcement facilitates learning, contends that
	A)	young children engage in aggressive behavior when they lack other means for getting their needs met.
	B)	if undesirable behavior in a young child is ignored, the child will eventually stop producing the behavior.
	C)	toys and other play materials should be withheld from preschool-aged children as punishment for their misdeeds.
	D)	social reinforcers are acceptable in the early childhood classroom, but tangible reinforcers are not.



17	According to Seana Moran and her colleagues, who believe that Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences can transform educational practice, which one of the following is a myth?
	A)	Individuals with strong intrapersonal intelligence are typically poor at reflecting on their own strengths and weaknesses.
	B)	Most people have “smooth” profiles, with equally well-developed abilities in all the intelligences.
	C)	Weaknesses in one type of intelligence invariably “pulls down” the other intelligences as well.
	D)	Educators should create activities for students that engage all the intelligences rather than focusing on only a single type of intelligence.



18	Perry D. Klein, who does not believe that Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences can transform educational practice, contends that
	A)	schools should nevertheless assess students in each of the intelligences proposed by Gardner.
	B)	students should be taught to assess (informally) their own ability in each of Gardner’s intelligences.
	C)	Gardner’s theory leads to the identiﬁcation of cognitive structures and processes that are far too narrow to be taught in school.
	D)	even if there are eight intelligences, as Gardner contends, it is not necessarily the case that school is the best context for developing all of them in children.



19	With which one of the following statements would Lauren B. Resnick, who believes that a push for standards and accountability will lead to more motivated students, agree?
	A)	Students cannot be expected to work hard unless they know what standards they are working toward.
	B)	Students should know what information will be on their tests (and other evaluations) in advance.
	C)	Exams should be graded by people other than the students’ own teachers.
	D)	Students must be required to meet the standards that teachers set in a ﬁxed period of time that is the same for all students.



20	Kennon M. Sheldon and Bruce J. Biddle, who do not believe that a push for standards and accountability will lead to more motivated students, argue that
	A)	standards will fail because they require students to work autonomously.
	B)	praise, especially contingent praise, can increase a student’s intrinsic motivation.
	C)	standards act as external rewards and punishments and thus do not foster a commitment to learning for its own sake.
	D)	the use of teacher incentive systems that are tied to student test scores will lead to higher quality teaching.



21	Mariale M. Hardiman, who believes that recent discoveries about the brain and its development have implications for classroom practice, would agree with which of the following statements?
	A)	Prior knowledge typically interferes with the learning of new information.
	B)	Stress and other negative emotions typically facilitate learning and memory.
	C)	Repetition of learning tasks improves memory and learning by strenghening connections among synapses.
	D)	Encouraging students to compare familiar concepts will interfere with memory and learning.



22	According to Gerald Coles, who questions the educational value of the current wave of brain research,
	A)	Most fMRI studies fail to exclude children whose reading problems are emotional or otherwise non-neurological in nature.
	B)	Reading problems are seldom, if ever, due to inadequate instruction in the classroom.
	C)	The brain imaging technologies of today are too invasive and thus, only adults with dyslexia (rather than children) have been studied.
	D)	Most fMRI studies rely on simple phonics activities rather than conventional reading, which requires comprehension of meaning.



23	With which one of the following statements would Steve Zemelman, Harvey Daniels, and Marilyn Bizar, who believe that the whole language approach to reading is effective, agree?
	A)	No research has been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the whole language approach.
	B)	Teachers have generally been too vocal in their support of whole language, and this has turned some parents off to the approach.
	C)	Critics of whole language believe that children are “ﬂawed” and need to be tightly controlled.
	D)	Whole language is effective but only after children have had years of explicit instruction in and practice with phonics.



24	According to G. Reid Lyon, who does not believe that the whole language approach to reading is effective, highly skilled readers
	A)	must be good at phoneme awareness, but phonics is not really necessary.
	B)	typically gloss over the text, sampling only parts of words and “ﬁlling in” the remainder.
	C)	are good at phoneme awareness but poor at structural analysis.
	D)	rarely skip over words and pay special attention to content words.



25	According to Laura Van Zandt Allen and Eleanor T. Migliore, who believe that greater parental involvement will improve academic achievement, the best predictor of student academic achievement is:
	A)	family income.
	B)	family social status.
	C)	parental support for learning at home.
	D)	high parental expectations for the student’s academic success, even if the student cannot meet those expectations



26	According to Rodney Ogawa, who does not believe that greater parental involvement at school is always beneﬁcial, schools should:
	A)	force teachers to accept, and even solicit, parental input to all matters about school and classroom operation.
	B)	create adversarial relationships between parents and teachers because growth and reform emerge from argument.
	C)	prevent parents, especially those who are less educated, from participating in all but the most trivial decisions about school operation.
	D)	allow parents to participate in some, but not all, decisions about the school.



27	The computer-based science program described by Marcia C. Linn and James D. Slotta, who believe that schools should embrace computers and technology,
	A)	was designed to address the needs of gifted, highly motivated learners and is not intended for use by the “average” student.
	B)	provides students with an array of science facts, which they are expected to memorize.
	C)	was designed to test students’ scientiﬁc knowledge rather than to teach them about science.
	D)	allows students to see in obvious and tangible ways if their scientiﬁc hypotheses and models are accurate.



28	Lowell Monke, who is in favor of more limited use of computers in schools, believes that
	A)	Elementary students are more likely to benefit from learning academic subjects on computers than are middle school or high school students.
	B)	Computers are useful tools for teaching symbolic skills to pre-symbolic students.
	C)	Schools should allow economically disadvantaged students earlier and more frequent access to computers compared to more affluent students so as to “level the playing field.”.
	D)	Elementary school students may lack many of the ethical insights and foundations required to use computers appropriately.



29	Biddle and Berliner, who argue for smaller class sizes, would agree with which of the following statements:
	A)	When planned thoughtfully and funded adequately, small classes in the early grades generate substantial gains for students.
	B)	The extra gains associated with small classes in the early grades seems to apply disproportionately to girls than to boys.
	C)	The extra gains associated with small classes in the early grades seems to apply disproportionately to girls than to boys.
	D)	The evidence for the possible advantages of small class sizes in the upper grades and high schools is conclusive.
	E)	All of the above.



30	Johnson, who argues against a policy of smaller class sizes, would most likely agree with which of the following conclusions:
	A)	Reducing class size works but it is too expensive.
	B)	Policy decisions should be based equally on political factors and evidence from research.
	C)	Teacher quality is a more important factor than class size on determining student outcomes.
	D)	None of the above.



31	According to Albert Shanker, who believes that a zero-tolerance policy can lead to safe schools,
	A)	zero-tolerance should be used with a student only after programs of self-esteem building and conﬂict resolution have failed.
	B)	schools should have codes of conduct that are shared with students and parents, but punishments for violations of the code should not be made public.
	C)	failure to punish misbehavior is the same as condoning it.
	D)	schools should be allowed to set their own disciplinary practices without the intervention or oversight of state or federal government.



32	According to Alfie Kohn, who do not believe that a zero-tolerance policy can lead to safe schools,
	A)	behaviorism offers the most promising strategies for reducing school violence.
	B)	reacting to violence with harsh punishment will be effective only if that punishment is equally likely for all students and all offenses.
	C)	the push for accountability and better standardized test scores may actually be the most effective way to decrease school violence .
	D)	children are more likely to be murdered at school than anywhere else.



33	With which one of the following statements would Richard M. Haynes and Donald M. Chalker, who believe that U.S. schools should be evaluated against schools in other countries, agree?
	A)	The United States is one of the few countries surveyed to have a national curriculum.
	B)	Nearly 40 percent of the typical U.S. curriculum is devoted to nonacademic subjects, such as health and driver education.
	C)	The United States spends less on education than does nearly every other country surveyed.
	D)	The United States spends less on special education and extracurricular activities than does any other country surveyed.



34	According to Ernest G. Noack, who does not believe that U.S. schools should be evaluated against schools in other countries,
	A)	schools in Germany make greater use of ability-level grouping than do schools in the United States.
	B)	schools in Germany have a shorter school year but longer school days than do schools in the United States.
	C)	students in Germany do less homework than do students in the United States.
	D)	schools in Germany have more special support personnel, such as counselors, librarians, and assistant principals, than do schools in the United States.

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