Higher education settings in the United States typically include several types of writing assessments. Since tests determining students' placement into writing courses are often high-stakes, it is imperative for those who make placement decisions to be knowledgeable of the different types of learners entering higher education in order to make…

Principals and teachers recommend strategies to prepare and motivate students for high-stakes testing. Strategies are based on what they determine to be effective for student success.

We argue here that the combination of U.S. federal education policy as embodied in the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" with the passage of a California state initiative that required that "nearly all classroom instruction [be] in English...for a period not normally intended to exceed one year" in 1998 created a "perfect…

The purpose of this paper is to report on a usability study for ESL websites conducted to gain insights from learners of English as a second language (ESL) as they interacted with specific sites. Five carefully selected ESL sites were tested by 10 different users generating a total of fifty testing sessions. Two major research questions guided the…

Since the 1997 election of the Labour Party to political power in the UK the foci for educational change have been widespread. One area that has received particularly intense scrutiny is that of teacher activity. In particular, the profession has seen a marked rise in the identification of "best practice". As a term "best…

In the past decade, major attention has been given to the power of tests and to the pivotal roles tests play in societies in shaping the definitions of language, affecting learning and teaching, and maintaining and creating social class. Accordingly, the quality of tests is not judged merely by their psychometric traits but also in relation to…

High-stakes testing and mandated assessments, which are major outcomes of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) contain multiple embedded values that affect the lives of students, their families, teachers, and counselors. A primary embedded value within the NCLB is the privileging of quantitative science over other methods of inquiry and…

The dependability of academic achievement measures for English language learners (ELLs) is influenced by three facts: (a) Each ELL has unique strengths and weaknesses in each language mode (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) both in English and in his or her first language, (b) each test item poses a different set of linguistic demands…

Recent school reforms such as NCLB have focused on standardizing learning outcomes, and in the process have stimulated many schools to standardize curricular content, particularly if those schools are in Program Improvement (PI) status as a result of not meeting testing targets. But these attempts at standardization have ignored the fact that…

Culturally proficient school leadership and its impact on narrowing the learning gap is both timely, and needed and the focus of discussion for this study. This phenomenological qualitative research study examined culturally proficient school leadership actions that help promote a measurable narrowing of the achievement gap in five southeastern…

The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) was established in 1990 as the first urban education reform in the U.S. built around the idea of permitting parents to enroll their children in private schools of their choosing at government expense. In its first year of operation, the MPCP or "Choice" program enrolled 341 students in the…

The State of Florida launched the College and Career Readiness Initiative to improve student readiness for postsecondary education and promote success after high school graduation. During the 2008 legislative session, s. 1008.30 (3), F.S., (also known as Senate Bill (SB) "1908") was revised to provide an opportunity for postsecondary…

This study explored the effects of high-stakes testing and accountability on the fundamental practices associated with middle school philosophy. Participants were middle school educators, including administrators and teachers, from Pennsylvania middle schools. An online survey was used to collect data for this study. The survey addressed the…

The present study is an examination of the contribution of bilingualism to trilingualism, namely the influence of learning two different orthographies on learning a third. The participants were two groups of sixth graders from Israeli schools who were studying English as a foreign (second or third) language: Russian Israeli children for whom…

This book offers specific how-to advice to college faculty on every stage of the testing process, including planning the test and classifying objectives to be measured, ensuring the validity and reliability of the test, and grading in such a way as to arrive at fair grades based on relevant data. The book examines the strengths and weaknesses of…