Scholars, advocates of various positions, and policymakers have fiercely debated whether the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), also known as the voucher or "Choice" program, has been a godsend or a scourge for the city's children. Wisconsin policymakers, concerned about that question, identified the School Choice Demonstration…

There is a critical need for research into the use of digital technologies to support the assessment of performance on complex tasks in schools. This paper reports on a component of a pilot study aimed at investigating the use of digital forms of performance assessment, manageable within schools, with high levels of reliability and capable of…

Background/Context: Portfolio assessment is a popular form of authentic assessment, but often portfolios become simply folders full of papers rather than student reflections on their work. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The author conducted a study aiming to help the ninth-grade students in his English language arts classroom…

The Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project is the most comprehensive effort thus far to ascertain which approaches help welfare recipients and other low-income people stay steadily employed and advance in their jobs. Launched in 1999 and slated to end in 2009, the ERA project encompasses more than a dozen demonstration programs and…

Rehabilitation counselor education is experiencing an explosion of knowledge, which is becoming increasingly difficult to organize and disseminate to students. Communities of practice, a form of social learning, provide a way to organize and disseminate information. Distance-based education programs are increasing within the field of…

Institutional performance was a topic given considerable attention by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Florida's Community College System responded to the challenge by committing to increase performance-based funding allocations from less than 2% to 5% of total state appropriations. Results of the analysis indicated that…

Over the past decade there has been increasing concern with aid effectiveness, and, more generally, development effectiveness. New ways of delivering aid have been developed, including sector-wide approaches and direct budget support. This paper reports on the progress that has been made through some of these new modalities of aid to education, as…

Guided by the trichotomous achievement goal framework, the current study examined mastery, performance-approach, and performance-avoidance goals and their relations to self-reported persistence/effort among Turkish students in secondary physical education. Two hundred twenty-nine students in grades 8 and 11 completed questionnaires assessing their…

In a FIPSE-funded assessment project, a group of diverse institutions collaborated on developing a common, course-embedded approach to assessing student writing in our first-year writing programs. The results of this assessment project, the processes we developed to assess authentic student writing, and individual institutional perspectives are…

This study investigated the usefulness of the many-facet Rasch model (MFRM) in evaluating the quality of performance related to PowerPoint presentations in higher education. The Rasch Model utilizes item response theory stating that the probability of a correct response to a test item/task depends largely on a single parameter, the ability of the…

This study investigates the relationship between the students' understanding of the aims of an investigative activity and their performance when conducting it. One hundred and eighty-one year nine students from a public middle school in Brazil took part in the study. Students working in pairs were asked to investigate two problems using a…

Purpose: Despite the crucial role that emotional intelligence (EI) could play in improving individuals' performance and career prospects in organizations, employees, executives and career professionals across the world are still in search of practical frameworks for understanding the concept. This is because EI research outputs from academics…

The purpose of this collective case study was to investigate the transitions of three effective teachers of literacy from pre-service to in-service teaching. As their university supervisor, I selected these students out of a group of pre-service teachers assigned to me for supervision during their eight-week student teaching requirement, based…

The PD program evaluated in this study is designed to address the problem of low student achievement in topics in rational numbers. The study focuses on seventh grade, the culminating year for teaching those topics. The study randomly assigned 77 mid- and high-poverty schools from 12 districts to treatment and control conditions and collected…

In an effort to explore the impact of performance incentives in education, the National Center on Performance Incentives (NCPI) partnered with the Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) to conduct the Project on Incentives in Teaching, or POINT. The study examines the effects on student outcomes of paying eligible teachers bonuses of up to…