As a result of poor student performance, professional development has emerged as a key strategy for improving instruction and achievement. In times of reduced resources and increased accountability, schools must evaluate their efforts in order to make sound decisions about policy and practice. This mixed method study was designed to investigate…

This qualitative interview study examined the classroom assessment knowledge and beliefs of five recent graduates of the University of New Mexico Special Education Dual License Program (SEDLP). Research questions were designed to gain understanding in three areas. First, in what ways did recent SEDLP graduates characterize their level of…

This report describes how big data and an evidence framework can align across five contexts of educational improvement. It explains that before working with big data, there is an important prerequisite: the proposed innovation should align with deeper learning objectives and should incorporate sound learning sciences principles. New curriculum…

This book contains exemplary resources for counselors, career development facilitators, school counselors, and other career professionals working in a variety of settings. This edition is an essential guide to career assessment and contains a comprehensive list of career assessment instruments. It has over 70 reviews and includes…

It is often assumed that a vertical scale is necessary when value-added models depend upon the gain scores of students across two or more points in time. This article examines the conditions under which the scale transformations associated with the vertical scaling process would be expected to have a significant impact on normative interpretations…

The need to enhance argument skills through education has become increasingly evident during the past 20 years. This need has resulted in an ongoing discussion that focuses on students' and teachers' argumentation and its support. However, apart from the extended competence-based discourse, no clear and homogeneous definition exists for…

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has garnered a great deal of attention from the rhetoric and composition/writing studies community since the Educational Testing Service began using e-rater[R] and the "Criterion"[R] Online Writing Evaluation Service as products in scoring writing tests, and most of the responses have been negative. While the…

The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) is one of the world's leading educational research centres. ACER's mission is to create and promote research-based knowledge, products and services that can be used to improve learning across the life span. This annual report describes ACER's milestones and accomplishments for the 2016-2017…

People are the lifeblood of colleges and universities. If there are no students, faculty, administrators, and staff, there cannot be a college or university. People are their primary resource, and the development of these people is their raison d'être. Due to the paramount importance of the people who are in higher education, it is essential to…

The components of a successful Response to Intervention (RtI) process are the following: monitored student growth, reviewed assessment tools used in screening students, and assessed data collection methods. RtI is well documented in the literature and has been the topic of many early intervention studies predominantly in the elementary setting.…

There is a widespread consensus among practitioners, researchers, and policy makers that current teacher evaluation systems in most school districts do little to help teachers improve or to support personnel decision making. For this reason, new approaches to teacher evaluation are being developed and tested. There is also a growing consensus that…

This article outlines the development of an assessment tool for charting student learning through inquiry and provides some insights into its use as an evidence-based practice tool for school library instructional teams. The tool, known as the Student Learning through Inquiry Measure (SLIM), has been developed and tested over a number of years by…

Responsiveness of clinical assessments is an important element in the report of clinical effectiveness after rehabilitation. The correlation could reflect the validity of assessments as an indication of clinical performance before and after interventions. This study investigated the correlation and responsiveness of Fugl-Meyer Assessment (FMA),…

Dodgson's method of computing determinants is attractive, but fails if an interior entry of an intermediate matrix is zero. This paper reviews Dodgson's method and introduces a generalization, the double-crossing method, that provides a workaround for many interesting cases.

Letter name knowledge (LNK) is a key predictor of later reading ability and has been emphasized strongly in recent educational policy. Studies of LNK have implicitly treated it as a unidimensional construct with all letters equally relevant to its measurement. However, some empirical research suggests that contextual factors can affect the…