Tag - standardized testing

Science Fair 911 – Tips for Teachers

By Guest Blogger Debbie Leibold 

So, you’re about to assign science fair projects to your students… now what? No need to worry, the Spangler Science team has some tips to make the science fair fun, interesting, and educational for your students (and easier for you)!

• First and foremost, if you are excited about the science fair, your students are sure to share your enthusiasm. Making science an integral part of your classroom throughout the year will help ignite students’ interest during science fair season.

• Consider modeling a science fair experiment for the class.  By doing so, your students will see firsthand how to come up with a hypothesis, create some tests to see the effect of a variable, and learn the difference between a demonstration and an experiment.  If your class science fair project was going on around the same time that your students were working on their own projects at home, the gathering of data, making charts and graphs, and developing conclusions that you do as a class would be great practice for your students as they work on their individual projects.  As we all know,
  

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President Obama Grants Waivers to 10 States for No Child Left Behind Act

By Blog Editor Susan Wells

Yesterday, President Barack Obama gave 10 states a waiver from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) 2001 Act. It was a bipartisan federal law signed by President George W. Bush on Jan. 8, 2002 that was a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

The ESEA was enacted in 1965 and reauthorized in 1994. It was the federal government’s flagship aid program for disadvantaged students. The No Child Left Behind Act came at a time when the public was highly concerned about education. It was designed to drive improvements in student achievement and to hold states more accountable for student progress.

NCLB worked to help disadvantaged students and touched every public school in America while expanding the federal government’s role in education. The goal was to get students up to reading and math standards by 2014 by building accountability into the education system through standardized testing. If schools did not show progress, they would face sanctions.

Since its inception, NCLB has been under fire in the education community. Some high-performing schools began failing to meet set
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