In California adult schools, standardized language assessments are typically administered to adult English as a second language (ESL) students upon enrollment; students then take these same state-approved tests throughout the academic year to demonstrate progress. As these tests assess only listening and reading skills, schools may use their own…

Conventional student-led evaluation is now an orthodox feature of the North American, UK and Australian higher education landscape. Increasingly, it is guiding major institutional decisions around educational quality, academic promotion and more recently institutional funding by government. Yet significant research around student-led evaluation…

How many students repeat a grade each year? How do retention rates vary across states and over time? Despite extensive research on the predictors and consequences of grade retention, there is no systematic way to quantify state-level retention rates; even national estimates rely on imperfect proxy measures. We present a conceptually simple…

Several different methods for projecting grade-progression ratios were tested with 12 years of grade-specific membership data for Virginia. In nearly all cases, projections made by exponential smoothing produced more accurate results than series produced by averages, moving averages, or regression methods. (SLD)

As part of a larger study, this paper examines the factors that determine promotion decisions at the end of first grade. Determinants of first grade failure are of particular interest because at this stage there are alternatives to failure. (Author/RWB)