Ethical codes and licensing rules provide foundational guidance for practicing school psychologists, but these sources fall short in their capacity to facilitate effective decision-making. When faced with ethical dilemmas, school psychologists can turn to decision-making models, but step-wise decision trees frequently lack the situation…

Education bureaucrats in 45 states have approved the Common Core State Standards ([CCSS], 2010) as the de facto national curriculum. The implementation of the CCSS will be monitored by a national standardized test in language arts and mathematics. The confluence of a standardized curriculum enforced with a standardized test will entrench a…

Purpose: Performance evaluation informs professional development and helps school personnel improve student learning. Although psychometric literature indicates that a rational, sound, and coherent standard-setting process adds to the credibility of an assessment, few studies have empirically examined the decision-making process. This article…

While the evidence for the effectiveness of the use of stories in science teaching and learning is strengthening in current research and literature, the intervention itself, namely, the science story, still suffers from a lack of definition and conception. The purpose of this paper is to determine the amount of narrative relative to non-narrative…

The Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) in the U.S. Department of Education funded the National Center on Intensive Intervention (NCII, or the Center) in 2011. NCII's mission during the first five years of funding was to build the capacity of local education agencies (LEAs) to support schools, practitioners, and other stakeholders in the…

This study investigates how different rounding rules and ways of providing Angoff standard-setting judgments affect cut-scores. A simulation design based on data from the National Assessment of Education Progress was used to investigate how rounding judgments to the nearest whole number (e.g., 0, 1, 2, etc.), nearest 0.05, or nearest two decimal…

Minimum passing scores for the Gearing Up for Safety: Production Agriculture Safety Training for Youth curriculum (Gearing Up for Safety) were set in 2006 with widely used and established procedures by efforts of subject matter experts (French, Breidenbach et al., 2007; French, Field, and Tormoehlen, 2006, 2007). While providing a research-based…

Critical thinking is an essential skill for learners and teachers alike. Therefore, it is essential that educators be given practical strategies for improving their critical thinking skills as well as methods to effectively provide critical thinking skills to their students. The "Handbook of Research on Critical Thinking and Teacher Education…

This article describes a novel variation of the Body of Work method that uses construct maps to overcome problems of transparency, rater inconsistency, and scores gaps commonly occurring with the Body of Work method. The Body of Work method with construct maps was implemented to set cut-scores for two separate K-12 assessment programs in a large…

An understanding of body composition is crucial to understanding human health, disease, and function. Research in body composition has focused on the development of assessment methods, description of normal changes in body composition with growth and development and aging, and the changes that occur in body composition in response to challenges…

Ethical considerations are inherent to programme design decision-making, but not normally explicit. Nonetheless, they influence whose interests are served in a programme and who benefits from it. This paper presents an analysis of ethical considerations made by programme design practitioners in the context of a polytechnic in Aotearoa/New Zealand.…

Inspired by Ontario's burgeoning interest in postsecondary student mobility, this article examines how elements of Europe's Bologna Process can help bridge the college--university divide of Ontario's postsecondary system. Via discourse analysis of relevant qualification frameworks and program standards, it argues that the current system…

Knowing that the majority of dual enrollment courses are taught on high school campuses by high school instructors, it is critical that mechanisms are in place to ensure the quality of the curriculum and the many components surrounding the curriculum--including textbooks, learning outcomes, course syllabuses, assignments, grading practices,…

This study examined the digital and social media communication practices of nine urban universities including UMSL and compared those to known corporate best practices. The purpose of this study was to (1) research how these universities are using social/digital communications to engage with students and prospective students; (2) compare the…

This paper considers how to establish the minimum required level of professionally relevant oral communication ability in the medium of English for health practitioners with English as an additional language (EAL) to gain admission to practice in jurisdictions where English is the dominant language. A theoretical concern is the construct of…