Annotation

What teachers Can Do to Improve Test Scores

Burns, David. “Will I do as well on the final exam as I expect? An examination of students’ expectations.” Journal of the scholarship of teaching and learning 8.3 (2008): 1-19. Some people might believe that talking about expectations only refers to personal thoughts and feelings about the performance before an examination. However, due to the fact that most of the time these expectations take part in the students’ evaluative process, these have been included as a field of study. Burns tries to demonstrate how these previous expectations may affect the score results. He explains the methodology in a very well organized way in order to present the main four attribution factors that may affect students’ expectations, which are: Self Handicapping, Test Anxiety, Time Spent Studying and Absences. After having all the results, four hypotheses were obtained based on the students’ tendencies to each one of the attribution factors. After the data was interpreted, the results showed that there is not any relationship between the previous expectations and the performance. Since this was proved, expectations may no longer be an issue that affects students’ performance, so it is important for teachers not to consider this as an influence in students’ results.

Useful Information

5 Online academic or profesional journals:

1.- “Education atlas”

http://www.educationatlas.com/education-reference-journals.html

This site provides information of all kinds of Education issues. It is very interesting, organized and useful.

2.- “Current issues in Education”

http://cie.asu.edu/articles/index.html

The journals that are shown here offer information about the current issues in Education worldwide.

3.- “The International Journal of Teacher Leadership” (IJTL)

http://www.csupomona.edu/~ijtl/

This offers aprox 5 papers per volume, each volume is released every 2 years aprox.

4.- “Teaching Educational Psychology”

http://www.teachingeducpsych.org/

Since Students’ behaviour is connected to the way they perform in the lessons, this website is very helpful in order to find information about the origin of their problems.

5.- “The Internacional Electronic Journal for leadership in learning”

http://www.ucalgary.ca/~iejll/

This provides intersting information. The main idea of the articles offered here are about how to succed in learning strategies.

All these websites are totally free. You have access to all the information that they provide without paying and without subscribing.

3 online databases that reference education-related journals.

1.- “Journal Seek”

http://journalseek.net/educ.htm

In this database you can find plenty of journals related to the education field. It gives the different categories and the amount of journals that you can find on it. The only drawback is that you can not read the full text , you have to subscribe.

2.- “Google”

www.google.com

Most of the people may think that this is only an online researcher, it is, but apart from the websites, this also provides information about books, and the online version of some books.