Intended to guide writing teachers through the complexities of evaluation, the essays in this collection represent a variety of approaches to evaluation. The essays display, however, some common beliefs about what is fundamentally important to writing teachers' work--specifically, the need: to distinguish between "grading" and…

Evaluation findings are presented from a 2-year project to design and field test an embedded assessment system in concert with the development of a middle school science course, "Issues, Evidence, and You," (IEY), by the Science Education for Public Understanding Program (SEPUP) at the Lawrence Hall of Science. IEY is a four-part course…

Modeling outcomes of school, hospital, or country performance as a consequence of initial conditions and assessing the entity's actual performance relative to what the model predicts (i.e., constructing a regression residual) is a natural way to measure performance. The usefulness of residual-based measures of performance depends on their…

This preliminary study examined the feasibility of using home videotape vignettes in the process of diagnosing young children's behavioral problems. It assessed whether recurrent symptomatic behaviors would appear spontaneously on home videotape. Twenty-eight mental health providers-in-training competed symptom checklists after viewing tapes of…

This guide is designed to help educators and administrators evaluate educational technology programs. Primarily geared to educators or administrators with little or no research experience, it is intended for use at the district or school level. As more and more states, districts, and schools develop technology plans to ensure that technology will…

This book suggests that portfolios can become a new kind of credential of competent and effective teachers. The book includes 5 parts with 16 chapters. Part 1, "Prologue," offers: (1) "Portfolio Possibilities: Validating a New Teacher Professionalism" (Nona Lyons) and (2) "Teacher Portfolios: A Theoretical Activity"…

The nine-volume Survey Kit is designed to help readers prepare and conduct surveys and become better users of survey results. All the books in the series contain instructional objectives, exercises and answers, examples of surveys in use, illustrations of survey questions, guidelines for action, checklists of "dos and don'ts," and…

This book is designed to help teachers, especially secondary school teachers, create and use performance assessments. The basic concept is that teachers must plan backwards from outcomes of education to shift the paradigm of curriculum-instruction-testing to a new and more fluid design. The book presents a wide variety of assessment approaches…

This book is a guide to the development and use of performance tasks and rubrics in the high school mathematics classroom. It contains a rationale for, and a discussion of strengths and limitations of, performance tasks to assess student achievement and progress in mathematics. A field-tested process is offered for developing performance tasks and…

This document contains a proposal for a district-wide multicultural high school curriculum for the Belleville Public Schools, Edison (New Jersey). The curriculum is designed to promote student bonding for peace and harmony by focusing on the total school environment and raising student, parent and staff consciousness about the many different…

The system of high-stakes accountability in the Kentucky public schools raises the question of whether teachers and administrators should be held accountable if test scores are influenced by external factors over which educators have no control. This study investigates whether such external factors , or "contextual effects," bias the…

This paper describes the processes that one school district, the Visalia Unified School District (California), went through in establishing a standards-based assessment and accountability system using multiple methods. First the district's standards-based assessment and accountability system and the methods used to establish it are described, and…

This report describes the development and psychometric qualities of a new instrument to assess clinical teaching effectiveness in medical education. The strength of the instrument is seen to lie in the qualitative development process involving iterative checking with key stakeholders; its high reliability, validity, and feasibility; and its ease…

This document contains four papers from a symposium on measurement and research tools for human resource development (HRD). "The 'Best Fit' Training: Measure Employee Learning Style Strengths" (Daniel L. Parry) discusses a study of the physiological aspect of sensory intake known as modality, more specifically, modality as measured by…

Principals and teachers are becoming frustrated with conventional evaluation practices typically used to determine teacher effectiveness and, thus, tenure and promotion. This Digest explains that as new performance standards are being developed, there are reconfigured assessment designs requiring an array of reflective, analytic skills. Creation…