In this report the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution presents the results of a self-developed Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI) along with an interactive application that grades large school districts according to the ECCI. The index is composed of 13 pro choice criteria. The authors present the ECCI as a…

Evaluating the impact of instructional innovations and coordinating instruction, assessment, and testing present complex tensions. Many evaluation and coordination efforts aim to address these tensions by using the coherence provided by modern cognitive science perspectives on domain-specific learning. This paper introduces an alternative…

One critical issue arising in the educational use of collaborative learning concerns the teacher's difficulty in evaluating the contribution and participation of each student in group-work. This article aims to illustrate and discuss a methodology that enables evaluation of the collaborative learning process based on co-writing in a wiki…

Over the past several decades, a wider range of assessment strategies has gained prominence in classrooms, including complex assessment items such as individual or group projects, student journals and other creative writing tasks, graphic/artistic representations of knowledge, clinical interviews, student presentations and performances, peer- and…

Many students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing are eligible for a signing accommodation for state and other standardized tests. The signing accommodation, however, presents several challenges for testing programs that attempt to administer tests under standardized conditions. One potential solution for many of these challenges is the use of…

Although the importance of systematic evaluation of educational policy and practice is well established, various problems confound the intention of evaluating regional or national activity with regard to computer-related activities in education. At least two of these problems relate to a general conception of the appropriate entry points for…

The importance of feedback as an aid to self-assessment is widely acknowledged. A common form of feedback that is used widely in e-learning is the use of model answers. However, model answers are deficient in many respects. In particular, the notion of a "model" answer implies the existence of a single correct answer applicable across multiple…