At first glance, closing the achievement gap seems fairly straightforward. It is a difficult task to accomplish, but it does not seem an especially complex one to conceptualize. How educators look at achievement gaps will determine their success in reducing them. When designing interventions, the author suggests that educators need to remember the…

Many CES schools have been wonderful to watch over the years. These schools have surpassed expectations in their percentage of graduates, scholarships awarded students for post-secondary schools, and graduates who as adults have better health, intact families, occupations, and participation in their communities than comparable students from…

Fixed effects models are often useful in longitudinal studies when the goal is to assess the impact of teacher or school characteristics on student learning. In this article, I introduce an alternative procedure: adaptive centering with random effects. I show that this procedure can replicate the fixed effects analysis while offering several…

The ability of school (or teacher) value-added models to provide unbiased estimates of school (or teacher) effects rests on a set of assumptions. In this article, we identify six assumptions that are required so that the estimands of such models are well defined and the models are able to recover the desired parameters from observable data. These…

Few documents in higher education have enjoyed the influence or longevity of the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the 1960 law that transformed the state's public colleges and served as a blueprint for public systems across the country. Even today, almost 50 years after it was written, the master plan retains a mythic status in…

Though many institutions provide an a la carte approach to the first year, Julie Alexander and John Gardner argue that meeting the needs of first-year students requires a cohesive strategic action plan. Here is their practical framework for mapping and developing such a plan.

Establishing the score or the placement as the first priority in a writing assessment leads to more reductive forms of writing assessment. However, if the prompts used in a direct test of writing were generative--that is, if they asked test-takers to analyze their own experiences as writers or learners, for example--the resulting texts would be…

The article describes a compulsory bioethics module delivered to [approximately] 120 biology students in their final year. The main intended learning outcome is that students should be able to analyse and reason about bioethical issues. Interactive lectures explain and illustrate bioethics. Underlying principles and example issues are used to…

This essay builds from ongoing development and research work on a model of pedagogy, from New South Wales, Australia, known as the Quality Teaching model. Where international calls for the professional development and certification of teachers rely on mechanisms of credentialing, often with scant direct attention to the acts of teaching, the NSW…

This paper assesses the cumulative long-term impact of successive years of high quality provision in schools. This was achieved by looking at the consequences, up to the age of 11 (Year 6), of attending a school where there was high or low value-added in each of the 7 years of primary education in England. Multi-level models for thousands of…

The focus of this paper is on the use of e-technologies to enable higher education to better assess aspects of learning that have proved difficult to assess using more conventional means. Higher education describes the knowledge and abilities it intends its graduates to have acquired before graduation, and it has a wide range of approaches to…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between measures of written vocabulary and writing quality. Participants included 92 second-grade students and 101 fourth-grade students. Students completed two writing samples: one an experimenter-developed writing task and the other, a standardized assessment of writing quality. Research…

Accurate spelling is a complex act that requires cognitive and linguistic knowledge of the phonological, morphological, syntactical, and semantic principles of our language. Students with disabilities frequently exhibit spelling difficulties related to language learning disorders and inefficient cognitive processing. These difficulties often are…

The problem with assessment in South African public schools persists. In 2008 thousands of candidates taking South Africa's first ever National Certificate Examination could not be resulted because of a failure to report school-based assessment (SBA) tasks. Only 62.5% of candidates prepared for the final external examination through a process of…

There is growing momentum all across the country for substantial change to the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Pending Congressional reauthorization of the NCLB Act presents an opportunity for change. At the same time, the Obama administration has signaled its understanding of the need for change by proposing…