In 2018, the Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB) opened rulemaking on the Standards of Effective Practice, which are the core set of knowledge and skills that all teacher candidates in Minnesota teacher preparation programs learn. Opening these regulations has created the opportunity for Minnesota to start rethinking how…

Although professional standards for Australian teachers were developed several years ago, this country is yet to develop such standards for special education teachers. The lack of standards for the special education profession is associated with the absence of a consistent process of accreditation in Australia and a lack of clarity in the pathways…

Standard-setting studies utilizing procedures such as the Bookmark or Angoff methods are just one component of the complete standard-setting process. Decision makers ultimately must determine what they believe to be the most appropriate standard or cut score to use, employing the input of the standard-setting panelists as one piece of information…

In a world where governments increasingly attempt to impose regulation on all professional activities, this paper advocates that professional standards for teachers be developed "by the profession for the profession". Foucauldian archaeology is applied to two teacher standards documents recently published in Australia, one developed at…

As economic globalization sweeps across the world, cross-border higher education cooperation has witnessed remarkable achievements. Quality improvements, however, have not stepped up accordingly due to reasons including imperfect and distorted policies, incomplete governance structures, and the absence of an effective internal quality assessment…

Various approaches to the professional development school (PDS)--each designed for its respective audience, mission, and purpose for engagement--have shaped the professional development school effort during the past 25 years. Central to these approaches is improving teacher quality in the service of student learning. This provides direction for…

Online education opportunities continue to expand across the United States, as is evidenced at a regional institution in northeast Texas. Research literature supports that both administrators and faculty have concerns regarding online education. The authors conducted a study at this institution to investigate the concerns of university…

Discusses reasons for the high interest in educational standards. Notes that most of the standard-setting efforts fall into one of three groups. Concludes that educators need to sort through the rhetoric to determine whether standards are indeed powerful tools for guiding educational decisions or whether they are unnecessary provocations. (RS)

Clarifies key propositions of the central-curriculum-control model and presents teachers' beliefs about effects of centralized policies on practice, based on interviews with teachers from three urban districts. Curriculum-control policies contribute to content standardization and standard setting. They control what is taught, rather than how it is…

The dominant profile judgment method, designed for use with profiles of polytomous scores on exercises in a performance-based assessment, is presented as a standard-setting method. The approach guides standard-setting panelists in articulating their standard-setting policies and allows for complex policy statements. (SLD)

The articles of this special issue propose two methods of deriving an initial standard and one method for determining the extent to which the standard should include compensation. Much work remains to be done on further development of the methods and the larger issues of policy regarding performance assessment. (SLD)

The number of students taking online courses in K-12 has increased exponentially since the inception of virtual schools in 1996. However, K-12 virtual schooling is a relatively new concept for those involved in teacher education. As teacher education departments build pre-service preparation programs, in-service professional development…

The National Assessment Governing Board and the National Center for Education Statistics sponsored a Joint Conference on Standard Setting for Large-Scale Assessments to provide a forum for technical and policy issues relevant to setting standards at local, state, and national levels. This executive summary conveys the essence of the conference by…

This literature review of teacher qualification standards consolidates information from various national groups and takes a historical approach to the development of current trends in such standards. We differentiate between teacher "qualifications" (the legal requirements for a credential) and teacher "quality" and summarize the stipulations of…

Ten factors relevant to the standard-setting decision on important tests (i.e., high school diploma tests) are proposed as a basis for a standard-setting preparation program. It is suggested that, typically, those who set standards have had little or no experience and would benefit from formal preparation. (SLD)