Questions about alternative forms of assessment were discussed by two elementary school and two high school teachers who are members of the National Education Association/International Business Machines (IBM) School Renewal Network. Their correspondence on that computer network was also analyzed. The following questions were considered: how have…

A new professional licensure system for teachers developed by the Minnesota Board of Teaching in conjunction with the Educational Testing Service is described. Initial work with the Rand Corporation in 1987 provided a plan for a new licensure system. The state's expectations for a performance assessment system to measure the skills of first-year…

The possibility of using portfolios as a placement tool for freshman English at the University of Nevada (Reno) was studied. Three university instructors who, among them, taught all 3 levels of freshman English, from remedial (English 001) to accelerated (English 102), read portfolios assembled for 58 students in 3 college-bound high school senior…

State law requires that all certified professional personnel employed in Georgia school systems have their performance evaluated annually by trained evaluators. The Georgia School Counselor Evaluation Program (GSCEP) was designed to be used across all systems and schools for annual formative and summative evaluation purposes. The process used to…

Instruction based on learning styles has received little attention in the recent reform efforts in mathematics education. The purpose of this book is to address the improvement of mathematics instruction through sensitivity to learning styles. The introduction discusses the scope and rationale of the book. Chapter 2 documents the need for…

One potential approach to the authentic assessment of what students know and can do in science is concept mapping. A concept map is a graph consisting of nodes representing concepts and labeled lines denoting the relation between a pair of nodes (concepts). The external concept map constructed by the student is interpreted as representing…

A survey of 312 teachers and families of students with severe disabilities in California, Colorado, Kentucky, Utah, and Virginia was designed to measure the extent of implementation of 12 educational "best practices" and the level of demonstration of 7 student outcome variables. The educational practices included: integration into school and…

The United States is moving toward a more national, performance-based view of curriculum policy. The federal government will play a modest role in nationalizing curriculum policy issues, largely by pressuring states and localities through national standards. The chief agents of nationalization will continue to be state and locally based…

An experiment using audiotaped student journals for course evaluation is described. Subjects were 200 native Cantonese-speaking technology students taking credit-bearing courses in English communication skills for building. One of the required tasks in the course was to indicate, in their oral journals, what they liked about an instructional…

Assessment of student performance is emerging as a crucial ingredient in the recipe for ongoing improvement of school science. This digest focuses on assessment in the service of instruction, for helping students, teachers, and parents monitor learning. According to M. Jorgensen, performance-based assessment requires that the student demonstrate,…

Between 1986 and 1990, a longitudinal study called Teacher Education and Learning to Teach (TELT) was conducted by the National Center for Research on Teacher Education (NCRTE). The purposes of the study were: to investigate how formal teacher education bears on teacher learning; the impact that a variety of approaches or alternatives have on…

The impact of portfolio assessment, specifically writing portfolios, on the norms of classroom assessment practices were studied in two English Language Arts classes in a middle class suburban high school in the Los Angeles (California) area. Data were gathered through observations and interviews, and the examination of 25 student portfolios, with…

A research project was conducted in Washington State in 1992 to develop an assessment system that could be used by adult basic education (ABE) and English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) programs to satisfy accountability requirements and to provide assessment information useful for classroom instruction. In this preliminary work, 35 ABE/ESL programs…

This study sought to examine American College Test (ACT) and basic skills placement test score patterns; the use of these test scores in academic advising; student performance in freshman level reading, English, and mathematics courses; relationships among these factors and their power to predict or account for placement and performance; and…

This paper compares the effects of desegregation on black achievement with the effects of other factors in the process of school learning that have recently been synthesized. The first section of the paper discusses techniques and guidelines for research synthesis, including meta-analysis. The second section presents a summary of the statistical…