Some writers in the measurement literature have been skeptical of the meaningfulness of achievement standards and described the standard-setting process as blatantly arbitrary. We argue that standard setting is more appropriately conceived of as a measurement process similar to student assessment. The construct being measured is the panelists'…

Qualitative manuscripts occupy a multidimensional world and can vary by their "latitude" (where they are with respect to the humanities and sciences), "longitude" (where they are with respect to the length and number of data excerpts), and "altitude" (where they are with respect to the level of theorizing). In this article, I discuss these 3…

There is a strong quest in several countries including Australia for greater national consistency in education and intensifying interest in standards for reporting. Given this, it is important to make explicit the intended and unintended consequences of assessment reform strategies and the pressures to pervert and conform. In a policy context that…

Our current educational environment is subject to persistent calls for accountability, evidence-based practice, and data use for improvement, which largely take the form of performance metrics (PMs). This rapid proliferation of PMs has profoundly influenced the ways in which scholars and practitioners think about their own practices and the larger…

Schools have long made use of digital technologies to support the co-ordination of management and administrative processes--not least "management information systems", "virtual learning environments" and other "institutional technologies". The last five years have seen the convergence of these technologies into…

The purpose of this article is to describe the process and development of English Language Proficiency (ELP) standards and assessment in Ohio and to discuss issues related to alignment. The article addresses the importance of alignment among standards, instruction, and assessment, as well as the effect of alignment on students' academic…

As inclusive practices and accountability continue to shape American education, special education and general education leaders will be challenged to join together in solving the problems of practice inherent in a diverse, complex, high-stakes educational environment. Professional standards provide a policy framework for the knowledge and skills,…

Clinical judgment is foundational to psychological practice. Accurate judgment forms the basis for establishing reasonable goals and selecting appropriate treatments, which in turn are essential in achieving positive therapeutic outcomes. Therefore, Spengler and colleagues' meta-analytic finding--clinical judgment accuracy improves marginally with…

This article proposes a conceptual framework to explain the adoption and diffusion of a national human resource development (NHRD) standard. NHRD standards are used by governments to promote training and development in organizations and increase the professionalization of practices used by organizations. Institutional theory suggests that adoption…

Objective: The goal of this study is to advance an approach to the assessment of the quality of studies considered for inclusion in systematic reviews of the effects of social-care interventions. Method: To achieve this objective, quality is defined in relation to the widely accepted validity typology; prominent approaches to study quality…

Quality Counts 2010 is the 14th edition of "Education Week's" annual report card on American public education as viewed through the lens of the states' education policies and outcomes. As in the past, this year's edition is built on twin foundations: (1) the detailed data collection and analysis of the Editorial Projects in Education…

Federal, State and school-based professional development has become a multi-million dollar educational enterprise in Australia. Yet there are no published models for the making of systems-level professional development policy. Reviewing the literature on the characteristics of effective professional development programs, this paper proposes a…

This article addresses the set of articles in this special issue of "Applied Measurement in Education" and reflects on the issues that underlie the articles. The authors, as a set, represent many of the professionals who have developed and studied the methodological procedures related to instruction-assessment alignment over the past decade.…

This article reports on the professional development of teacher educators within the context of a national project, "Professional Quality of Teacher Educators," where a professional standard and a standards-based procedure of (self-)assessment and professional development have been created and effectively implemented. This project…

The authors assert that, in order to teach vocabulary more effectively and better understand its relation to comprehension, we need first to address how vocabulary knowledge and growth are assessed. They argue that "vocabularly assessment is grossly undernourished, both in its theoretical and practical aspects--that it has been driven by…