Every student deserves an education that prepares him or her for lifelong learning, success in the world of work, and participation in representative government. Unfortunately, far too many students are not receiving the high-quality educational experiences needed to help them reach these goals. Meaningful progress toward equity in education does…

Central Piedmont Community College is exploring ways to help at-risk students achieve academic success by utilizing an early-alert system called Success Through Academic Reporting (STAR). All First-Time, Full-time Degree-seeking students (FFD) receive an opportunity for follow-up services that support a centralized strategy, which has the…

Higher education expert William F. Massy's decades as a professor, senior university officer, and consultant have left him with a passionate belief in the need for reform in America's traditional universities. In "Reengineering the University," he addresses widespread concerns that higher education's costs are too high, learning falls…

The purpose of this article is to identify school board best practices in K-12 education. Research suggests that school boards must continue to be actively involved in the governance of local policies and practices regardless of the size of the school district. In addition to monitoring progress and taking corrective action when school goals are…

Continuous Assessment (CA) systems are externally directed, curriculum-based assessment schemes used for both summative and formative purposes within classrooms. CA has been implemented as national policy in several postcolonial developing countries and is believed to hold great promise for improving education outcomes. This theory-driven…

This paper reports the results of a survey that investigated the practice and experience of task management of university students. A total of 202 tasks identified by 24 university students were analyzed. The results suggest that participants had a reasonable sense of priority of tasks, that they tend to perceive a task as a big chunk, not a…

Current educational reform mandates the implementation of school-based models for early identification and intervention, progress monitoring, and data-based assessment of student progress. This article provides an overview of interdisciplinary collaboration for systems-level consultation within a Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) framework.…

Executive skills are the cognitive abilities that make it possible for people to set goals, regulate impulses, and complete the steps necessary to achieve their objectives. Examples of these skills include time management, emotional control, and organization. Richard Guare and Peggy Dawson have developed a coaching strategy based on executive…

The Maine Legislature requested the Maine Education Policy Research Institute (MEPRI) to conduct an assessment of standardized testing in Maine schools to understand the amount, cost, and usefulness of it. This report summarizes the resulting effort, which included a literature scan, document analysis, and surveys of two groups of school…

In the 127th Maine State Legislative Session, "An Act to Implement Certain Recommendations of the Maine Proficiency Education Council" (S.P. 660 -- L.D. 1627) was passed into law as Chapter 489. This amended the chaptered law passed in 2012, "An Act to Prepare Maine People for the Future Economy" (S.P.439 -- L.D.1422),…

The author is pleased to have the opportunity to respond to "Measuring Students' Writing Ability on a Computer-Analytic Developmental Scale: An Exploratory Validity Study." The authors of that article have undertaken a challenging project and seem to be on track to developing a technically adequate, practically useful writing…

Curriculum-based measurement (CBM) is an assessment technique that has become increasingly popular in schools, gaining importance with the recent national emphasis on school and teacher accountability for student achievement. CBM is used to monitor student performance to provide an indicator of which students are at-risk of not achieving grade…

This paper examines the status of the implementation of continuous assessment (CA) in Mettu University. A random stratified sampling method was used to select 309 students and 29 instructors and purposive method used to select quality assurance and faculty Deans. Questionnaires, focus group discussion, interview and documents were used for data…

This article provides teachers in rural settings with suggestions on how to engage classroom resource personnel (i.e., volunteers, instructional assistants) in monitoring students' achievement. The target, act, and graph (TAG) strategy offers rural special educators ways to empower classroom resource persons through training and use of the TAG…

Textbooks are heavily used in secondary-level content area classes, but previous research has identified numerous challenges for students associated with reading and understanding these texts. While students can learn reading strategies that help them better understand text, it is unclear the extent to which textbooks are written to promote or…