It is well established that children’s early life environments can have significant consequences on their long-term outcomes. Yet, there is still limited empirical evidence on the effects that being exposed during the prenatal and early postnatal periods to positive shocks, such as conditional cash transfers, has on long-term cognitive function. By exploiting the initial village-level randomization, I estimate the causal effect on long-term cognitive achievement of prenatal and early postnatal exposure to Oportunidades, Mexico’s conditional cash transfer program. I find that those eligible children born into the program who received its benefits early on have higher standardized assessment scores in mathematics and Spanish in third through sixth grade—up to 15 years after the program began. In line with previous research on CCTs, the effects are largely driven by children living in the poorest villages as measured by a marginalization index. Notably, the effect on these children is large enough to put their cognitive achievement on a par with children from more moderately poor villages.

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The current trend in Ontario toward greater educational accountability through standardized curriculum and testing appears to be based largely on the hope that compliance with external standards will lead to a more transparent, uniform, and predictable educational system. Through a focus group and individual interviews, this case study explores the experiences and perceptions of three elementary school teachers from one school who are required to implement the Ontario curriculum, as well as to provide annually administered standardized tests to their students in reading, writing and mathematics. The research conducted suggests how specific aspects of the tension between teachers' localized perceptions of classroom life and provincial curricular requirements and Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) testing are redefining the educational realities experienced by students and teachers in one contemporary Ontario school and its classrooms.

Unlike textual description, pathfinder network (an algorithm that results in a kind of concept map) provides a visual way to describe the knowledge structure of a student. It often provides a clear measure of the student's understanding and highlights the student's misconceptions. The traditional approaches of assessment such as multiple-choice questions and word problems often fail to identify these misconceptions. The following steps were carried out for this study. 1. The study assessed the knowledge structures of grade 11 physics students of a public high school of Ottawa and their instructor using pathfinder networks. The work concept (a subset of links around the concept of work) in the students' pathfinder networks was compared to the work concept in the referent network and the similarity between them was calculated. 2. During the intervention phase of the study, individualized instructions and exercises based on the misconceptions about the concept of work, shown by their knowledge structures, were given to the students. 3. The study again assessed the knowledge structures of the students for a change in work concept in their pathfinder networks by comparing it with the referent network. The study also analyzed the control concepts of "mass" and "gravity" in the pathfinder networks of the students and found no significant change in those. In addition to pathfinder networks' utility as a global measure of conceptual knowledge of the students, which is useful for summative assessment, this research is a step forward to provide evidence that an individual node in the pathfinder network can be explored to study a particular concept in the network. Therefore, the research demonstrates the potential utility of pathfinder networks for formative assessment. This offers the possibility of providing the students with extremely comprehensive feedback. Results revealed that the similarity index of work concept in the pathfinder networks of the students increased from pre- to post-intervention phase. Most likely, the major reason for this change was that individualized instructions were given to each student about the concept of work which stimulated and probably changed some of their misconceptions. To address validity, the similarity indices of mass and gravity concepts in the pathfinder networks of the students were also checked for improvement. The result shows that there is no significant improvement in mass and gravity concepts as the individualised instructions were not given to the students about mass and gravity concepts. Findings support the use of structural assessment of knowledge with pathfinder scaling technique for formative assessment as a way to enhance learning.

This qualitative study describes tensions and dilemmas that two secondary mathematics teachers experience in their classroom assessment and how they negotiate these tensions and dilemmas in their practice as they try to implement current reforms. The focus on tensions and dilemmas gives particular insight into the complexities of "doing" classroom assessment in a manner that is aligned with the current reforms and is helpful for identifying areas that need further work in both the research and teaching communities in order for these reforms to be more widely implemented. The tensions and dilemmas that the two participants described included issues in grading and reporting, colleagues resisting current reforms in classroom assessment, difficulties interpreting and implementing policies from different levels, students' poor work habits and study skills and issues in the design and use of performance tasks. These issues were negotiated through discussions and collaboration with other colleagues that support assessment reforms, a general feeling that assessment reforms support and are important to improving students' learning, and a great deal of personal reflection and constant development of assessment practice.