Comprehensive medical and mental health evaluations of children in foster care are recommended within 30 days of entering care. What constitutes a comprehensive evaluation has yet to be established. This study examines the need to include educational assessment as a component of the comprehensive evaluation. Rates of achievement and language…

In this paper, the authors critically examined the problems of admission into Nigeria Universities; and expressed the view that about seventy percent of Nigerians are not aware of the essence of the present system of education, which is geared towards producing individuals with adequate knowledge and skills needed for self-reliance or employment…

Every year, New Zealand assesses students' learning progress through the National Educational Monitoring Project (NEMP). NEMP is a national, formative evaluation effort that provides New Zealand educators with an accurate picture of students' education progress at Year 4 and Year 8, which are roughly comparable to grades 3 and 7 in the United…

The collection of which this article is a part is entitled "Functions of Assessment in Teacher Education." The other papers in this set draw our attention to multiple functions of assessment including peer evaluation, promoting reflection, use of technology in demonstrating teacher competence, and validating new national standards of excellence…

The recent increase in the use of constructed-response items in educational assessment and the dissatisfaction with the nature of the decision that the judges must make using traditional standard-setting methods created a need to develop new and effective standard-setting procedures for tests that include both multiple-choice and…

Reporting within the administration responsible for primary and secondary schools in the Kirov region from the early 1930s to 1941 followed a script of escalating negativity in which the higher the chain of command, the more negative the assessment. School directors wrote positive quarterly and annual evaluations. District and municipal…

There are approximately 8,600 schools in the US that had failed to make their minimal requirement of "adequate yearly progress" and were labeled under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy criteria, as "low-performing." Some of these schools were in fact doing great but had only failed in meeting the requirement of having 95% of its students take the…

Some of the challenges that test publishers face in constructing educational assessments that meet high technical quality as prescribed in the "Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing" (AERA, APA, NCME, 1999) are examined. Federal educational initiatives are used to illustrate demands on technical quality that challenge the efforts of…

The student-assessment results that schools must report to satisfy No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requirements could be useful in pinpointing strengths and weaknesses in instructional programs and students' skills. However, many school staffs lack the expertise to learn from assessment results. We describe lessons learned from a yearlong workshop…

Examined the trajectory of change in scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills of low-income, urban third and fourth graders enrolled in classrooms in which the Work Sampling System (WSS) had been used at least 3 years. Results for 2,564 students show academic gains associated with the WSS. (SLD)

Increased attention to large-scale assessments, the growing number of English language learners in schools, and recent inclusionary policies have collectively made assessment accommodations a hotly debated issue, especially regarding the validity of test results for English language learners. Decisions about which accommodations to use, for whom,…

Education and assessment in Swedish schools have been affected by several reforms during the last two decades. The educational system has moved from centralization to decentralization and a goal-oriented approach has been introduced on all educational levels. This paper provides an historical overview of the Swedish educational system, educational…

There has been substantial interest in recent years in the performance and accountability of teachers and schools, partially due to the No Child Left Behind legislation, which requires states to develop a system of sanctions and rewards to hold districts and schools accountable for academic achievement. This focus has lead to an increase in…

Three South American countries, Argentina, Chile and Brazil, have been selected in order to study the impact of the document "The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development". In these countries, whose people react energetically against any attempt to break the environmental balance, the synergic power of education is…

This work is grounded in a constructivistic conception of the learning of science, more particularly on the model known as teaching-learning as oriented research. In accordance with this theoretical basis we have developed an empirical research project to investigate the teaching of electrostatics in high schools. The designs developed have…