This study examined the relationship of intentional faculty professional development, intentional online course design, and informal course reviews to the results of official interinstitutional peer review within higher education institutions. Quality Matters[superscript TM] (QM) provided the setting for this exploration of the relationship of…

The National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools (NSBECS) were published in 2012 to serve as both a guide and assessment tool for PK-12 Catholic school effectiveness and sustainability. The NSBECS rest on the conviction that adhering to these standards and benchmarks with fidelity will result in highly…

Content standards, not performance standards, have been almost the sole focus of state policies and recent conversations about academic standards. Without rigorous content and performance standards, we cannot adequately prepare students for the global marketplace. A recent AIR study shows that state performance standards are consistently low and…

The United States is transforming how it assesses the academic attainment of its schoolchildren. These changes will come, in part, with the implementation of the new Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortia (SBAC) assessments in the spring of 2015, as well as other…

In this article, the author discusses how to implement the Common Core State Standards in the classroom. She presents examples and activities that will leave teachers feeling "rosy" about tackling the new standards. She breaks down important benchmarks and shows how other teachers are doing the Core--and loving it!

These appendices accompany the report "Final Report of the i3 Impact Study of Making Sense of SCIENCE, 2016-17 through 2017-18." Science education has experienced a significant transition over the last decade, catalyzed by a re-envisioning of what students should know and be able to do in science. That re-envisioning culminated in the…

This report presents a multi-year study of how states are implementing their state college- and career-readiness standards. In this report, the Southern Regional Education Board's (SREB's) Benchmarking State Implementation of College- and Career-Readiness Standards project studied state efforts in 2014-15 and 2015-16 to foster effective…

This study analysed accreditation exercises of universities undergraduate programs in Nigeria from 2001-2013. Accreditation is a quality assurance mechanism to ensure that undergraduate programs offered in Nigeria satisfies benchmark minimum academic standards for producing graduates with requisite skills for employability. The study adopted the…

This report focuses on the progress made and challenges faced by the nine states in achieving the first three objectives for which they were held accountable for use of their Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge (RTTELC) funds. It discusses discrete findings related to these objectives in relevant chapters of the report: Tiered Quality Rating…

All of the 15 states in this study have recently been involved in school accountability system reform. Since 2011, the states have taken advantage of a federal program to give them flexibility around certain accountability requirements of the "No Child Left Behind Act" of 2001 (NCLB), the most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and…

By 2012, all of the states in this study had started implementing new or revised teacher and leader evaluation systems. The systems include many and varying updates. In some cases, the updates were designed to meet conditions for a state's "Race to the Top" grant. In others, the updates were made to meet conditions for a state's waiver…

The Australian Professional Teaching Standards require pre-service teachers to complete a minimum number of days of professional experience in order to graduate. Problems can arise, however, when the evaluation of their professional experience against the Standards shifts from the providers of teacher education programmes to school-based…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) represent the first time that nearly every state has set common expectations for what students should know and be able to do. In the past, each state set its own standards, and the results varied widely. And while states collectively developed these common standards, decisions about the curriculum and…

The Civil Rights Research Roundtable on Education is an initiative of the Warren Institute that convenes an ongoing learning community composed of leading national civil rights organizations to discuss the latest educational research and evidence-based practices related to civil rights goals in education. This research brief reviews the research…

The Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006 (Perkins IV) supports career and technical education (CTE) in high schools and postsecondary institutions, such as community colleges. Perkins IV established student performance measures at the secondary and postsecondary levels for state agencies, such as state educational agencies,…