This booklet is designed to help teachers integrate curriculum, strategies, evaluation, and learners' needs within the context of the larger education picture and to encourage teachers to revisit the fundamentals of education in light of professional teaching experience. The booklet includes places for the reader to record his/her own thoughts and…

Each year the New Mexico State Department of Education and the state's 88 school districts publish report cards that provide information on the operation and performance of the schools and characteristics of its students. This report is the state-level report card, providing narrative and statistical information on an array of educational…

Papers in this volume are: "National funding for the New Hampshire Limited-English-Proficient (LEP) Student Identification Project. Through this program, states are mandated to collect information on LEP students and report data to the U.S. Secretary of Education. This report is intended to highlight the growth of the project over the past 3…

This report presents the results of a 2-year collaborative effort by the Illinois State Board of Education and 2 independent evaluators to assess early childhood programs in various sites throughout Illinois, and to provide models for other schools or community programs developing and expanding services for young children. The evaluation…

In 1987, Seattle Central Community College (SCCC), in Washington, began a 5-year project to gather evidence on SCCC's success in imparting knowledge, skills, and values to its students. This report represents a compilation of major assessment activities and provides brief descriptions of 10 studies on outcomes grouped by specific dimensions of…

Anchored instruction and anchored assessment are described and illustrated through a mathematics problem from the Jasper problem solving series developed at Vanderbilt University in Nashville (Tennessee). Anchored instruction is instruction situated in a context complex enough to provide meaning and reasons for why information is useful. Problems…

From 1980 to 1991, the University of Alberta undertook systematic reviews of all its academic and support units mostly for program improvement purposes, but also to acquire information for planning and budget decisions. This report responds to a 1988 request to examine the University's 1980-1988 experience with program reviews and to recommend…

The approach to assessment taken by the Colorado Springs (Colorado) Public Schools is outlined. Colorado Springs has taken a position similar to that advocated by the National Council on Educational Standards, that of multiple means of assessment applied in a dynamic and responsive manner. This approach in Colorado Springs is called Purpose Driven…

This publication is a guide to assessing the competence of prospective foreign language teachers with respect to their subject area in California. The guide was developed as part of a state-wide response to legislated entry and exit standards for teachers in elementary and secondary schools. A preface stresses the importance of quality education…

At one of a series of hearings on H.R. 6, the Elementary and Secondary Education Amendments of 1993, several experts discussed issues related to national assessment, assessment in Chapter 1, and state efforts to develop new forms of assessment. Eleanor Chelimsky, Assistant Comptroller General for Program Evaluation and Methodology of the General…

This paper advances the perspective that more frequent and comprehensive assessments, and more frequent and complete evaluations of college and university programs, are essential if colleges and universities are to improve minority access and achievement. Without denying the need to create new sources of data and information for measuring…

An outline is provided for a national educational assessment and improvement plan as suggested by the National Education Goals of 1990. The following implicit assumptions underlie National Education Objective 5.5: (1) abilities to think critically, communicate effectively, and solve problems can be defined and the definitions can be agreed upon as…

This paper makes a case for the development of several indirect indicators of national progress in reaching the collegiate attainment objective of the National Education Goals of 1990. These indicators would be developed concurrently with a proposed performance-based assessment to be administered to a national sample of graduating college seniors.…

What has been learned from the study of relationships between abilities and outcomes learned in college and those abilities as they are performed at work is summarized to infer principles that should inform a national system to assess the higher order thinking and communications skills of college graduates in support of the National Education Goal…

College-level assessment efforts in New Jersey are described. For more than a dozen years, students in public colleges and universities in New Jersey have been assessed using a common statewide instrument, the New Jersey College Basic Skills Placement Test. This test assesses reading, writing, and mathematics skills of entering college students as…