Since 2000, the only serious attempt to mobilise new resources for education has been the World Bank's co-ordinated "Fast Track Initiative (FTI)." However, the FTI only raises funds for achieving universal completion of primary school and it does not address early childhood education or adult literacy. To date the Global Campaign for Education has…

The "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) Act has failed to provide funds and programs envisioned by President George W. Bush. The Act's key tenets promised improved student learning and professional development for teachers, but changes in national priorities have prevented congress from meeting state requests for assistance. Schools are…

Few analyses have examined what testing's political status means for how those outside the education establishment view externally mandated tests and what they expect them to accomplish. This article provides such an analysis by first elaborating on the notion that testing and accountability have become political issues. It then describes the…

Distance learning has been widely researched the past few years, nevertheless the focus has been more on its technological dimension. Designing, developing and supporting a large scale e-learning application for Higher Education is still a challenging task in many ways. E-learning is data-intensive, user-driven, and has increasing needs for…

Information systems can play a vital role in supporting the planning and management of development programs and, as such, they are fundamental to improving people's health, education, training, and enhancing the transparency of decisions and actions taken by public and private agencies in these and other domains. This paper examines how…

A large number of community college students have difficulty with postsecondary-level reading, writing, and math demands, necessitating remedial education. A qualitative case study was conducted to investigate state and institutional practices for remediation in 15 community colleges selected for region, size, and urbanicity. The six states in…

This article considers and illustrates a strategy to study effects of school context on differential item functioning (DIF) in large-scale assessment. The approach employs a hierarchical generalized linear modeling framework to (a) detect DIF, and (b) identify school-level correlates of the between-group differences in item performance. To…

We report on a study of what happened when we recycled a conceptual examination question in a first-year university physics course. The question, which was used for three consecutive years, asked about an astronaut's experience of weighing in an orbiting space-craft. The original intention was to use a phenomenographic approach to look for…

The purpose of this article is to develop a framework to understand and assess the quality of learning environments in the workplace. It is argued that indicators used to measure and assess informal learning at work, at both the national and the enterprise level, are underdeveloped. Consequently, current frameworks to measure and benchmark…

Researchers in this study analyze the websites of 30 Washington state school districts to explore differences and similarities between high- and low-performing districts. The study offers evidence about ways educators use accountability data on district websites to communicate with parents, community members, and business representatives about…

This article outlines the experiences of a first-year writing program's adoption of large-scale portfolio assessment as part of its move from student-focused assessment to programmatic assessment. This research is an attempt to provide evidence to support the claims benefits associated with portfolio assessment and to chronicle the changes that…

As institutions of education and learning, the higher education sector has a significant role to play in implementing the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014). Some institutions have already acknowledged, and are shaping, their roles in working towards sustainability through appropriate development and…

Purpose: In addition to mapping the consistency in rhetoric behind education for sustainability, despite changes in jargon over the past 30 years, this paper endeavours to estimate the degree to which these ideas have been integrated into the Australian tertiary sector. Design/methodology/approach: The results of a recent internet-based audit of…

Purpose--Environmental assessment (EA) is a proactive planning tool designed to consider the ecological, cultural, socio-political and economic impacts of potential projects, making it a major tool for achieving sustainable development. Meaningful EA requires a bridging of the natural sciences with the social sciences to broaden understanding of…

What does a high school diploma do for new graduates? For decades, Americans have come to expect a diploma to do at least two things: (1) offer a chance at jobs that support a family; and (2) qualify its holder for entrance into the military. But today, most young people and their parents also expect it to open the door to postsecondary education,…