Across the United States, school districts are adopting benchmark assessments to help teachers modify instruction over the course of a school year. Yet many teachers remain wary. In this article, the author presents views from teachers regarding the benchmarks.

The game presented in this article provides for students' development of the use of models, benchmarks, and equivalent forms to judge the size of fractions in a motivational and flexible way.

The recent positions of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) and the European Foundation for Management Developments (EQUIS) on the value of entrepreneurship suggest a more entrepreneurial perspective in a business school's culture and strategic processes for obtaining and sustaining a business school's reputation. The…

In the current climate of emphasis on outcomes assessment, colleges and universities are working diligently to create assessment processes for student learning outcomes, competence in general education, student satisfaction with services, and electronic tracking media to document evidence of competence in graduates. Benchmarking has become a…

There are a number of reform initiatives underway in Turkey but some of these, which are concerned with curricular and structural changes, have encountered serious difficulties. This paper begins with a brief summary of school effectiveness and school improvement research guiding many educational reforms. It then gives some information about…

Over the past two decades, higher education in advanced capitalist societies has undergone a process of radical "reform". A key element of this reform has been the introduction of a number of accounting-based techniques in the pursuit of improved accountability and transparency. While the "old" accounting was to do with stewardship, the "new"…

A 10 year, longitudinal examination considered student performance for an Allied Health Distance Education (DE) program. The purpose was determining if students face-to-face in a classroom with an instructor performed differently than their counterparts located at a distance, taking class through an alternative delivery system. The question often…

How influential has the "US News" Best Colleges ranking been over the last twenty-five years since it was first started in 1983? In what ways does this influence manifest itself? There is strong evidence of the impact of the US News rankings among consumers, prospective students and their parents, and the higher education establishment in the…

Mirroring national trends, children of color in Washington state's King County are overrepresented at every point in the child welfare system and fare worse by most measures than are Caucasian children. The King County Coalition on Racial Disproportionality was formed to reduce and ultimately eliminate racial disproportionality in the county's…

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was tasked with identifying the key science concepts for science literacy in K-12 students in America (AAAS, 1990, 1993). The AAAS Atlas of Science Literacy (2001) has organized roughly half of these science concepts or benchmarks into fifty flow charts. Each flow chart or strand map…

The purpose of the provincial ESL (English as a second language) articulation process is to maintain high standards of quality in ESL programming at the public post-secondary institutions of British Columbia, as well as to facilitate access to programs at other public institutions for students wishing to transfer. This ninth edition of the ESL…

This article presents a model that instructional leaders can use to engage in a change process that fosters effective instructional change in school districts and individual school buildings, specifically middle schools and alternative middle schools. The authors describe four dimensions of leadership and explain how each dimension informs…

This report examines programmes for youth that combine learning in classrooms with participation in work in 10 Mediterranean countries: Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey. It is one element, together with the development of a network of policymakers and experts from the…

This guide describes a process that can be used or adapted by school districts to evaluate standards and guide practitioners in developing locally appropriate benchmarks. The guide is not a training manual that provides a step-by-step guide for undertaking this effort with a group of educators; instead, it suggests an approach and rationale for a…

Suggests that strategic planning can help an organization mature and become more effective. Aims for strategic planning with a benchmarking objective, beginning with the information process-maturity model, assessing strengths and weaknesses, and identifying opportunities for process maturation. Finds all components of the reporting structure now…