Measuring alignment of various educational components is an important issue in educational research because with aligned educational system, we can have clear expectations about what to teach and assess. In this study, we examined the alignment between mathematics curriculum standards and college entrance examinations from Korea and China. The results indicate that curriculum standards and high stakes assessments from both countries are not well aligned to each other. Their Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC) indices were lower than what previous studies have found and the critical values (Fulmer, 2011; Liu & Fulmer, 2008; Liu et al., 2009). There are several topics that are not assessed in both countries' national assessments. Also, discrepancies between the most frequently covered topics in the curriculum standards and the most frequently assessed mathematical topics in the national assessments caused topic level misalignment. We also found misalignment in cognitive level. Both national assessments included more perform procedures and demonstrate understanding items than their respective curriculum standards. Thus, previous findings about the inclusion of more items with higher cognitive demand in assessments is only partially true for either country. With these results, it is difficult to say that whether mathematical topics in the curriculum standards appropriately represent and support students to do well on the CSAT and the NCEE or that the mathematical items in the CSAT and the NCEE validly assess students' level of mathematical understanding.

Spending as much time outside of school as in school, gifted youth are affected by non-school aspects including parents, other family members, peers, mentors, mathematics competitions and camp participations. These influences have been known to shape children's intellectual development, academic achievement, interests, and eventually college and career choices. From interviews with five former Olympians from Korea to identify out-of-school influences on their academic achievement and development, we discovered, in addition to confirmation of previously identified factors, additional sources of positive influence seldom previously mentioned and more common to Korean culture were gleaned - mathematics workbooks and Ha-Gwon. The findings of this study are informative for teachers and parents who are interested in development of gifted youth in providing ways to accommodate their special needs and in showing how they can carefully individualize those sources to be positively affecting intellectual development as well as academic achievement.

Despite its importance when it is employed in classrooms, scaffolding is limited in the classrooms. Many researchers have focused on contingent teaching, which is the first component of scaffolding. Given a lack of research on contingent teaching with prospective teachers (PSTs), this paper explores how PSTs intend to do contingent teaching in small groups when they engage in mathematics teaching. Building on research on contingent teaching, I analyzed 26 PSTs' written responses to scenarios in an online open-ended survey. The focus of the analysis was on how the PSTs would do contingent teaching that might support students to learn the subject matter. I present findings in relation to what the PSTs' responses showed in relation to contingent teaching with the subject matter. The findings will be discussed along with implications.

Researchers have been attending to the potential of curriculum materials as resources for professional development. In order for a curriculum material to fulfil such purpose, curriculum authors should intentionally attend to educativeness of the material. A feature of educative material is that its voice speaks to teachers. In this study, I explore educativeness of Algebra teacher guides by attending to their voice. In particular, I focused on the use of pronouns, modality, and imperatives. Findings indicate that some teacher guides have more educative voice than the others and that the amount each guide talk to teachers were less than sufficient. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.