The "Notes & Reflections" newsletter offers practical information--ideas, strategies, tools, and resources--about topics of special interest to professional developers who are working to improve school performance. Today, professional development services to schools are provided by variety of people: teacher leaders; principals; and district,…

In fall 2003, the Head Start Bureau began implementing the Head Start National Reporting System (NRS) to systematically assess the early literacy, language and numeracy skills of all 4- and 5-year-olds enrolled in Head Start. In addition to child progression on a designated set of outcomes during the year preceding kindergarten, the data will…

This policy brief examines several questions regarding the impact of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on students with disabilities, including: What are the benefits of the law? What are the unintended consequences? Does NCLB conflict with the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA)? In addition, the author conducted an…

This book contains a collection of papers presented at the SEAMEO RELC International Seminar, held April 18-20, 2005. The sixteen papers contained in this volume deal with various aspects of the field of learning and teaching oral communications skills. These include the theoretical background, practical applications and the assessment of oral…

Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLBA) designates federal funds to support the education of students with limited English proficiency and provides for formula-based grants to states. This report describes the data the Education Department used to distribute Title III funds and the implications of data measurement issues for the…

CES EssentialVisions is releasing three DVDs over the course of fall 2005, 2006, and 2007. Each DVD will capture how the Common Principles have been implemented, illustrating how students engage in their own education and how teachers develop as professionals. Focused segments provide unique perspectives on the benefits and challenges of each…

The purpose of this study was to use realistically simulated data to evaluate various CAT designs for use with the verbal reasoning measure of the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT). Factors such as item pool depth, content constraints, and item formats often cause repeated adaptive administrations of an item at ability levels that are not…

The purpose of this paper is to review the theoretical and empirical literature relevant to language performance assessment. Following a definition of performance assessment, this paper considers: (1) theoretical assumptions underlying performance assessment; (2) purposes of performance assessment; (3) performance assessment procedures; (4) merits…

This paper is a report on the development of a digital portfolio system for a teacher education program. The development of the system was based upon a three-year comparative case study of four principals representing rural and urban schools and included pre-kindergarten through 12th grade levels in a Midwestern state. The research generated…

The term "informed clinical opinion" appears in the regulatory requirements for the implementation of Part C of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) as an integral part of an eligibility determination. It must be included in evaluation and assessment procedures, since it is a necessary safeguard against eligibility…

The Anne E. Casey Foundation (AECF) funded replications of effective jobs projects to achieve better job placement and retention for low-income, young adults. The six projects funded, collectively called the Jobs Initiative (JI), in Denver, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Seattle, and St. Louis, used an outcomes framework developed by The…

Viewed as a first step in the development of a consensus framework for the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in civic education, this paper focuses on the major questions that should be considered in designing a civics assessment. The paper aims to bring major questions of designing a civic education assessment tool to the…

This paper offers a model for determining the economic impact of a community college on its locality. The paper argues that strict adherence to the Caffrey and Isaacs (1971) model revealed three significant problems. First, several of the Caffrey and Isaacs economic estimates are either inappropriate or less appropriate for use by community…

The U.S. Department of Education's Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention publishes "Catalyst," a newsletter covering current Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence (AODV) prevention issues at institutions of higher education. "Catalyst" discusses emerging issues and highlights innovative efforts on…

In recent years metacognition has been receiving increased attention in mathematics education. Special attention has been focused on metacognition and its essential role in achievement settings. The basic difficulty of the study on the field of metacognition is to develop and use valid tasks in order to measure metacognitive ability especially for…