Technology is not in the forefront of teacher education program thinking and planning. Yet, it is the tool dramatically changing education. Internationally, the role of technology has evolved from the role of assisting the teacher in personal management to using technology for instruction. To respond to this need, universities are altering courses…

Performance pressure at both the institutional and individual level of secondary education has been identified as a pressure that is acknowledged all over Europe and raises questions about the extent to which agents in lower and upper secondary education interpret assessment in terms of either control or learning, or perhaps both. Drawing on…

This article presents a historical description of and research related to the development, validation, and combined use of the multiple editions of the Bracken Basic Concept Scale and its companion curriculum, the Bracken Concept Development Program. In tandem, the scale and curriculum were designed to assess and teach more than 300 basic language…

Undergraduate enrollment has grown and changed drastically over the past two decades, with a significant portion coming from nontraditional students who have returned to campuses to pursue a college degree. To better meet the needs and demands of nontraditional students, many institutions have implemented programs that allow for the awarding of…

With scant research to draw upon with respect to the maintenance of vertical scales over time, decisions around the creation and performance of vertical scales over time necessarily suffers due to the lack of information. Undetected item parameter drift (IPD) presents one of the greatest threats to scale maintenance within an item response theory…

Pursuant to Board policy ("Title 4, Chapter 14, Section 4"--in part), a review of existing programs shall be conducted by all institutions of the Nevada System of Higher Education on a regularly scheduled basis. The process for reviewing programs varies by institution but contains similar vital components. These components include…

Developmental evaluation (DE) offers a powerful approach to monitoring and supporting social innovations by working in partnership with program decision makers. In this book, eminent authority shows how to conduct evaluations within a DE framework. Patton draws on insights about complex dynamic systems, uncertainty, nonlinearity, and emergence. He…

This paper investigates whether inferences about school performance based on longitudinal models are consistent when different assessments and metrics are used as the basis for analysis. Using norm-referenced (NRT) and standards-based (SBT) assessment results from panel data of a large heterogeneous school district, we examine inferences based on…

The articles in this special issue make two important contributions to our understanding of the impact of accommodations on test score validity. First, they illustrate a variety of methods for collection and rigorous analyses of empirical data that can supplant expert judgment of the impact of accommodations. These methods range from internal…

This paper describes an educational analysis of a first year physics experiment on standing waves for engineering students. The educational analysis is based on the ACELL (Advancing Chemistry by Enhancing Learning in the Laboratory) approach which includes a statement of educational objectives and an analysis of student learning experiences. The…

The Illinois Initiative on Transparency in Learning and Teaching is a grassroots assessment project designed to promote students' conscious understanding of how they learn and to enable faculty to gather, share, and promptly benefit from data about students' learning by coordinating their efforts across disciplines, institutions, and countries.…

In this essay, John F. Ebersole describes how, during his tours of the higher education conference circuit throughout the spring of 2013, as both a participant and observer, he came away with a good sense of the issues occupying the attention of American higher education during this period. Ebersole shares ten of the most common themes and…

Concerned by the need to decolonize education for Aboriginal students, the authors explore philosophies of Indigenous ways of knowing and those of the 21st century learning movement. In their efforts to propose a way forward with Aboriginal education, the authors inquire into harmonies between Aboriginal knowledges and tenets of 21st century…

Recent reform initiatives, such as the Title I School Improvement Grants and Race to the Top, recommended a principal change to jump-start school turnaround. Yet, few educational researchers have examined principal change as way to improve schools in a state of systematic reform; furthermore, no large-scale quantitative study has determined the…

This article presents a model for culturally responsive instruction (CRI) that represents a synthesis of research on effective literacy and content instruction for diverse middle grades learners.The article discusses the various elements of the Culturally Responsive Instruction Observation Protocol (CRIOP) model. It then examines these elements by…