America's fragmented, decentralized, politicized, and bureaucratic system of education governance is a major impediment to school reform. In this important new book, a number of leading education scholars, analysts, and practitioners show that understanding the impact of specific policy changes in areas such as standards, testing, teachers, or…

This volume is concerned with the alignment between the way the mathematical performance of students is assessed and the reform agenda in school mathematics. The chapters in this book have been prepared to raise a set of issues that scholars are addressing during this period of transition from traditional schooling practices toward the reform…

The essays in this collection consider the meaning of authentic assessment and the implications of its use. "Section 1: Assessing Assessment" includes the following essays: (1) "The Nation's Report Card Goes Home: Good News and Bad about Trends in Achievement" (Robert L. Linn and Stephen B. Dunbar); (2) "Budgets, Politics, and Testing" (Chris…

This book supports constructive discussion about assessment and provides concrete directions for change. The 10 chapters outline many of the difficulties associated with current standardized testing. While most educators refer to the new non-standardized test efforts as alternative assessments, this type of assessment is increasingly being called…

The research effort reported in this document addresses the important national need for determining the validity of large-scale content assessments in English with students who are in the process of acquiring English as a second language. Often these students have been excluded from such assessments, but there have been recent, growing efforts to…

This collection provides a new perspective for understanding what assessment can do to promote continuous improvement in education. The concepts of systems thinking, continued learning, mental models, shared vision, and team building are highlighted in the selections, which include: (1) "A Systems Approach to Assessing School Culture"…

This collection presents evaluation reports on 52 Atlanta (Georgia) public schools. Critical questions and key findings are presented for each school in the areas of: (1) general descriptive characteristics, such as enrollment, student mobility, Chapter 1 services, and prior experiences of students; (2) performance-based achievement on Georgia…

Assessment of student learning, the measuring of students' progress and performance, is an important concern for library media specialists. Twelve articles are presented which address the issue of assessment of library media services. The titles are: "The Growth of Assessment" (George F. Madaus, Ann G. A. Tan); "Library Information…

Four papers follow and document the progress of the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing in understanding questions related to alternative assessment based on case studies in three elementary schools. The research questions include consideration of the logistical constraints that must be respected in developing…

"Educational Measurement" has been the bible in its field since the first edition was published by ACE in 1951. The importance of this fourth edition of "Educational Measurement" is to extensively update and extend the topics treated in the previous three editions. As such, the fourth edition documents progress in the field and…

A collection of articles on second-language testing includes: "The State of Language Testing in the 1990s" (J. Charles Alderson); "The Exercise of Power and Control in the Rhetorics of Testing" (Elana Shohamy); "Institutional and Political Aspects of Language Testing" (Bernard Spolsky); "Language Planning Policy…