This profile describes the key features of the examination and assessment systems of Romania. It provides a snapshot taken at the end of more than a decade of major political, social and economic changes, when it is widely accepted that Romania has made significant advances in its educational reforms and that important innovations are now becoming…

Scotland's "Assessment is for Learning" initiative (AifL) seeks to introduce a co-ordinated national system for assessment in schools. Formative assessment is a major plank in this. The initiative has moved beyond its pilot phase and it is intended that it will be adopted by all Scottish schools by 2007. This article draws upon the…

The pendulum has been swinging back and forth between traditional and progressive educational approaches for more than 100 years, but we still haven't figured out how to reduce the learning gap. In this first article in a two-part series, Mr. Pogrow suggests fundamental policy changes and argues for finding ways to combine the best of the…

Art provides students a way to visually represent their scientific knowledge and at the same time helps teachers assess student understanding. Examining a drawing allows teachers to scrutinize students' mental model of a science concept. Science can be described as a continuing process of discovering the order and recurring patterns in nature;…

Schools are the primary environment in which to conduct prevention programs for school-age children. Educators, policy makers, and psychologist argue that prevention efforts should begin as early as possible to maximize their effectiveness. Surprisingly, there are relatively few school-based prevention programs targeted for preschoolers. Given the…

The state with the largest public higher education system in the nation takes important steps toward establishing a statewide accountability model.

The No Child Left Behind Act requires the states to test their students every year to determine how many of them have achieved proficiency in, among other areas, math, science, and reading. The law also requires that the states participate yearly in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which calls itself "the Nation's…

As an analysis of context and rationale, and of the changing strategies and practice since the early 1990s, this article identifies the major arrangements for assuring and enhancing educational quality and touches on their characteristics, with a focus on the Japanese national universities. The effects of, and issues raised by, current strategies…

Ninety-one baseline assessment schemes were approved by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority for use by schools for the assessment of all children in England in their first seven weeks in school (age 4 to 5 years). Analysis of the content of a sample of 42 of the schemes (comprising all the schemes supplied in full to the researchers)…

The backwash effect of assessment on learning is widely acknowledged. This article discusses the impact of assessment on learning in a wider sense, by focusing on how assessment drives not only student learning, but also the teaching practices, the designing of educational programmes and the production of learning material. The focus is on how…

Preffi 2.0 is an evidence-based Dutch quality assessment instrument for health promotion interventions. It is mainly intended for both planning and assessing one's own projects but can also be used to assess other people's projects (external use). This article reports a study on the reliability of Preffi as an external quality assessment…

This study examines how a state system of higher education, located in the Rocky Mountains area of the United States, allowed faculty members from the state's public institutions of higher education to control the design and implementation of a pilot assessment of statewide general education courses. One of the primary reasons faculty were allowed…

This article reports on 4 distinct Illinois reform initiatives that attempted to connect assessment to curriculum, instruction, and school improvement. Using quantitative and qualitative data obtained from principals and teachers involved in local reform efforts from 1993 through 2002, this study indicates that the lack of development of local…

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it examines the requirement in No Child Left Behind (NCLB) that states have all students "proficient" in math and reading by 2013-2014. Second, the article assesses the organizational capacity of eighth-grade programs in Massachusetts to meet that directive. Issues of organizational…

This study explores the use of multiple measures to enhance the validity and reliability of inferences about school and district effectiveness. Using data from the state of Ohio, a framework for combining measures is applied to examine the individual and collective impact of multiple measures on both the federal AYP designations and state ratings.…