Both professional development programs for teachers currently in the classroom and programs for preparing future teachers should provide technology-rich experiences throughout all aspects of the training. Standards and resources within the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)'s project "Information and…

American regional accreditation serves two basic functions: quality assurance and quality improvement. Through its public function of quality assurance, accreditation signals to prospective students, parents, employers, and others that the institution meets fundamental standards of quality. Through its private function of quality improvement,…

In 1989, the delegate assembly of the Council for Exceptional Children began the process of developing standards of knowledge and skills for all beginning teachers of special education, including teachers of children who are deaf or hard of hearing. Now in its third major revision, these standards provide guidance to states' departments of…

The National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE) is an advocate for having highly qualified physical education teachers deliver developmentally appropriate, standards-based instruction in schools. However, a comprehensive definition of what constitutes a highly qualified physical education teacher did not exist until recently.…

Psychometricians continue to introduce new approaches to setting cut scores for educational assessments in an attempt to improve on current methods. In this paper we describe the Item-Descriptor (ID) Matching method, a method based on IRT item mapping. In ID Matching, test content area experts match items (i.e., their judgments about the knowledge…

Many approaches to standard-setting use item calibration and student score estimation results to structure panelists' tasks. However, this requires collecting standard-setting judgments after the item analysis results are available. The Scoring Guide Alignment approach collects standard-setting judgments during the scoring sessions from teachers…

Current Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP; 2001) standards promote the use of triadic supervision by counselor educators and supervisors. However, conceptual models of triadic supervision do not presently exist in the supervision literature. This article describes the process and structure of 1 model…

This publication provides information relating to Arizona Academic Standards for Grade 8. The following standards are reviewed: (1) the arts standards; (2) comprehensive health standards; (3) foreign and native language standards; (4) reading standard articulated by grade level 2003; (5) writing standard articulated by grade level 2004; (6)…

Describes how a new approach to setting standards for colleges, the Academic Quality Improvement Project, follows principles from manufacturing and industry. (EV)

This article describes the system of monitoring district instructional-reform efforts and the influences of the system on teachers and school and district leaders in Duval County, Florida. First, the author offers a brief description of the snapshot system. Second, the study's design, data sources, and analytic methods are presented. Third, the…

During the last thirty years, National Qualification Frameworks have emerged as an attempt by the state to "manage" the relations between education, training and work. Drawing on South African experiences of ten years of development of a competency and outcomes based National Qualifications Framework (NQF), this paper highlights the…

In judgmental standard setting experiments, it may be difficult to specify subjective probabilities that adequately take the properties of the items into account. As a result, these probabilities are not consistent with each other in the sense that they do not refer to the same borderline level of performance. Methods to check standard setting…

This paper presents the background of the development of the International Standard Bibliographic Description for Serials and Other Continuing Resources, or ISBD(CR). Discussion includes: formation of a working group in 1997 to look at the existing ISBD and objectives of the project; the first official meeting of the working group in August 1998…

The Technology Costing Methodology (TCM) project developed and validated a generally agreed upon set of principles and practices for the costing of distributed/distance learning (DDL) courses. This article describes the TCM project, illustrates the application of the costing methodology (including capital costs), and concludes with a demonstration…

Discusses an assessment survey questionnaire administered to randomly selected sociology departments (n=150) regarding the level of development of their departmental statements of purpose, goals, and objectives among other questions. Reports that two thirds of the 70 respondents have a departmental statement of purpose, but less than half have…