This article aims to provide practical strategies and examples for pre-service early education programs and early education teachers to develop music- and movement-based curricula for teacher preparation programs and early childhood music classrooms. To address the inconsistencies in early childhood music programs, the authors developed the…

Effective assessments guide student learning, refine teaching practices, ensure curriculum alignment, and foster workforce readiness. However, the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, such as ChatGPT, has significantly disrupted traditional assessment processes, raising concerns about academic integrity and necessitating…

Arguments are presented for conceptualizing validity within a postmodern approach. Validity, reliability, and generalizability have been a holy trinity of social science research, and standard definitions of validity have been taken from criteria developed for psychometric tests. From a postmodern point of view, validity is sometimes discarded as…

New methods are needed to judge the quality of alternative student assessment, methods which complement the philosophy underlying authentic assessments. This paper examines assumptions underlying validity, reliability, and objectivity, and why they are not matched to authentic assessment, concentrating on the constructivist paradigm of E. Guba and…

Recently, many insights have been gained into how to create powerful learning environments. The goal of learning how to teach in this way has important consequences for teacher training. Firstly, scholars indicate the necessity to work out a theoretical framework for the student-teachers which is sufficiently complete, but still manageable, and…

This paper describes an evaluation model called embedded training evaluation (ETE) which can be used to evaluate different types of training ranging from basic skills through constructed learning. The model was developed for the New York State Child Welfare/Child Protection Services Common Core training program. ETE is particularly effective in…