An evaluation study of the district's counseling and guidance services was undertaken to provide guidance to the San Mateo City School District Board of Trustees in their consideration of staff reductions. Evaluation to support policy decisions should use multiple measures, collecting both quantitative and qualitative data addressing board…

The "Notes & Reflections" newsletter offers practical information--ideas, strategies, tools, and resources--about topics of special interest to professional developers who are working to improve school performance. Today, professional development services to schools are provided by variety of people: teacher leaders; principals; and district,…

This book contains a collection of papers presented at the SEAMEO RELC International Seminar, held April 18-20, 2005. The sixteen papers contained in this volume deal with various aspects of the field of learning and teaching oral communications skills. These include the theoretical background, practical applications and the assessment of oral…

CES EssentialVisions is releasing three DVDs over the course of fall 2005, 2006, and 2007. Each DVD will capture how the Common Principles have been implemented, illustrating how students engage in their own education and how teachers develop as professionals. Focused segments provide unique perspectives on the benefits and challenges of each…

The purpose of this study was to use realistically simulated data to evaluate various CAT designs for use with the verbal reasoning measure of the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT). Factors such as item pool depth, content constraints, and item formats often cause repeated adaptive administrations of an item at ability levels that are not…

The purpose of this paper is to review the theoretical and empirical literature relevant to language performance assessment. Following a definition of performance assessment, this paper considers: (1) theoretical assumptions underlying performance assessment; (2) purposes of performance assessment; (3) performance assessment procedures; (4) merits…

This paper is a report on the development of a digital portfolio system for a teacher education program. The development of the system was based upon a three-year comparative case study of four principals representing rural and urban schools and included pre-kindergarten through 12th grade levels in a Midwestern state. The research generated…

The term "informed clinical opinion" appears in the regulatory requirements for the implementation of Part C of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) as an integral part of an eligibility determination. It must be included in evaluation and assessment procedures, since it is a necessary safeguard against eligibility…

The Anne E. Casey Foundation (AECF) funded replications of effective jobs projects to achieve better job placement and retention for low-income, young adults. The six projects funded, collectively called the Jobs Initiative (JI), in Denver, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Seattle, and St. Louis, used an outcomes framework developed by The…

Viewed as a first step in the development of a consensus framework for the 1998 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in civic education, this paper focuses on the major questions that should be considered in designing a civics assessment. The paper aims to bring major questions of designing a civic education assessment tool to the…

This paper offers a model for determining the economic impact of a community college on its locality. The paper argues that strict adherence to the Caffrey and Isaacs (1971) model revealed three significant problems. First, several of the Caffrey and Isaacs economic estimates are either inappropriate or less appropriate for use by community…

In recent years metacognition has been receiving increased attention in mathematics education. Special attention has been focused on metacognition and its essential role in achievement settings. The basic difficulty of the study on the field of metacognition is to develop and use valid tasks in order to measure metacognitive ability especially for…

Intended for instructors of English as a Second Language (ESL), adult basic education, and workplace literacy, this manual focuses on three questions: What is authentic assessment? What are the steps in planning authentic assessment? How is the learner involved? Section 1 discusses some components of authentic assessment. In doing so, it addresses…

Almost overnight, the World Wide Web has made the solution of "classic" information retrieval problems a pressing commercial goal. The various information retrieval solutions being offered on the Web are quite familiar to the librarian. The various Web search sites make use of "traditional" inverted indexes, manual indexing,…

Career development in Canada has been gaining prominence over the past decade. This digest outlines the principles on which career development must remain focused. First, the meaning of "career success" needs to be reconceptualized. With companies downsizing, people need to be able to view themselves as successful, despite changing…