The authors consider how portfolios can meet the challenges of assessing various aspects of literacy and student learning. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) specify the knowledge and skills students need for success in college and the workplace--including writing in all content areas. The CCSS attends to range as a core theme in a more…

This paper reports a case study of four project schools in the primary school context of Hong Kong. It has investigated how teachers who were assigned subject panel head's and curriculum leader's roles perceived the student assessment reform and how they experimented with new assessment strategies in the school policy and classroom practice. The…

Recent federal legislation has created strong incentives for states to adopt principal evaluation systems, many of which include new measures of principal effectiveness such as estimates of student growth and changes in school climate. Yet, there has been little research on principal evaluation systems and no state-by-state analysis of the…

The availability of reliable evidence for teaching practices after professional development is limited across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines, making the identification of professional development "best practices" and effective models for change difficult. We aimed to determine the extent to which…

This study explored EFL students and faculty's perceptions of and attitudes towards the use of online assessment and practice. A descriptive method was used, employing quantitative data collection and analyses from a sample of 400 students of different age categories and educational levels and another sample of 25 teachers in the English…

Across the U.S., youth development approaches are being tested in out-of-school time programs as a strategy to combat the growing opportunity gap between privileged and underprivileged youth (Gardner, Roth, & Brooks-Gunn, 2009). Along with increased recognition of the value of youth development programming has come increased financial support…

Background/Context: From two decades of research on the grading practices of teachers in secondary schools, researchers discovered that teachers evaluated students on numerous factors that do not validly assess a student's achievement level in a specific content area. These consistent findings suggested that traditional grading practices evolved…

Technology, which forms part of all educational settings and curricula, is becoming an integral part of higher education too. Therefore, observations and interpretations from inside such settings are needed for a more realistic understanding. This study evaluates the information packages of the undergraduate programs of a university within the…

The absence of universally accepted definitions for direct and indirect assessment motivates the purpose of this article: to offer definitions that are literature-based and theoretically driven, meeting K. Lewin's (1945) dictum that, "There is nothing so practical as a good theory" (p. 129). The authors synthesize the literature to…

Engaging professional adults in an online environment is a common challenge for online instructors. Often the temptation or commonly used approach is to mirror face-to-face strategies and practices. One premise of this study is that all strategies used in an online environment are assessment strategies, and as such should be considered for their…

This study examines teachers' intention to engage in School Based Assessment (SBA) in secondary schools of Sri Lanka, by utilising Ajzen's (1985) Theory of Planned Behaviour. Multiple regression analysis was employed for data analysis. Given the recent attention on curricular reforms in many countries, this study contributes to the limited…

The focus of this paper--and the series of which it is a part--is on improving student learning during the crucial period spanning grade 12 and the first year of college in order to build momentum for college success. In the introductory paper to this series, "Why 12th Grade Must Be Redesigned Now--and How," Jobs for the Future names…

These appendices describe the matching process used to identify an appropriate set of comparison schools for use in the report evaluating Year 2 of the Expanded Success Initiative, "Changing How High Schools Serve Black and Latino Young Men." As described in Chapter 2 of the report, selecting schools similar to ESI schools to serve as a…

This paper describes the Assessment Practices Framework and how I used it to study a high school Chemistry teacher as she designed, implemented, and learned from a chemistry lab report. The framework consists of exploring three teacher-centered components of classroom assessment (assessment beliefs, practices, and reflection) and analyzing…

What makes a category seem natural or intuitive? In this paper, an unsupervised categorization task was employed to examine observer agreement concerning the categorization of nine different stimulus sets. The stimulus sets were designed to capture different intuitions about classification structure. The main empirical index of category…