Answer to Question 1
(1) Standards. States must establish challenging content and performance standards in math, reading/language arts, and science for all students from 3rd through 8th grade. What constitutes challenging standards is left to the discretion of the states. (2) Testing. All states must test students in grades three through eight each year on that state's standards. Decisions about the types of tests to use, the lengths of the tests, and the difficulty of the tests, are left to each state. (3) Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP. All schools must have a certain percentage of students scoring at the proficient or higher level each year so that by 2014 all students, including low-SES students, English language learners, and students with disabilities, have reached proficiency in math and reading. 4) Reporting. All school districts must issue an annual report card to the public that describes how all groups performed that year. (5) Accountability. NCLB specifies increasingly severe penalties for schools that fail to achieve AYP for two or more consecutive years. These may include labeling a school as needs improvement, allowing students to transfer to other schools in the district, providing students with supplemental instructional services, and replacing the entire staff of a school.
Answer to Question 2
Recognition is noting familiar features and relating them to already stored information. The process is interactive, depending partly on information taken from the stimulus and partly on information stored in long-term memory. Information not selectively attended to and recognized disappears.