Three South American countries, Argentina, Chile and Brazil, have been selected in order to study the impact of the document "The United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development". In these countries, whose people react energetically against any attempt to break the environmental balance, the synergic power of education is…

Although the belief has been expressed that performance assessments are intrinsically more fair than multiple-choice measures, some forms of performance assessment may in fact be more likely than conventional tests to tap construct-irrelevant factors. As performance assessment grows in popularity, it will be increasingly important to monitor the…

This 1993 report is the second issue of the "State of the State--Education Performance in North Carolina," which monitors the health of North Carolina's education system as a whole and compares it to national and regional performance data. The first two sections define characteristics of North Carolina and its schools. Information about…

Free-response (FR) item formats, such as essay questions, are popular in educational assessment. The criticisms against FR items are that they are more expensive to score, take up more testing time, provide less content coverage, and are less reliable than multiple-choice (MC) items. For these reasons, FR items are often combined with MC items.…

This report summarizes findings of a 3-year study conducted by the SouthEastern Regional Vision for Education (SERVE) that examined the effectiveness of the implementation of a public-private partnership effort at South Pointe Elementary School in Miami, Florida. South Pointe was the first public school in the United States to be run by a private,…

American national standards for the evaluation of educational programs were developed by the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation in 1994. This paper describes the Joint Committee's standard setting process. The Joint Committee is a coalition of professional organizations concerned with the quality of evaluations in education.…

When using item response theory (IRT) models in educational and psychological measurement, it is standard practice to estimate the operating characteristics of test items from examinees' item responses alone. This is the final report of a project that employed Bayesian and empirical Bayesian methods to exploit additional information that is often…

Assessing school quality can be a difficult task. This audiotape produced by the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL) was designed to help listeners make sense of the process. The audiotape takes listeners on a guided tour of a typical middle and elementary school. The tour is conducted by a group of experienced educators, who…

A national survey of state-articulated student goals and outcomes led to the analysis of documents from four states for correspondence with the outcomes specified for age 3 in the conceptual model of the National Center on Educational Outcomes for Students with Disabilities (NCEO). In the survey, 36 states (including the District of Columbia)…

A national survey of state-articulated student goals and outcomes led to the analysis of documents from 25 states (including the District of Columbia) for correspondence with the outcomes specified for age 6 in the conceptual model developed by the National Center on Educational Outcomes for Students with Disabilities (NCEO). Of the 36 survey…

A national survey of state-articulated student goals and outcomes led to the analysis of documents from 30 states for correspondence with the outcomes specified for grade 4 in the conceptual model developed by the National Center on Educational Outcomes for Students with Disabilities (NCEO). Overall, the study found moderately high correspondence…

Validity is an integrated evaluative judgment of the degree to which empirical evidence and theoretical rationales support the adequacy and appropriateness of interpretations and actions based on test scores or other modes of assessment. The principles of validity apply not just to interpretive and action inferences derived from test scores as…

This publication consists of a set of case studies of quality assurance practices in distance teaching universities. The case studies are particularly relevant at a time when universities in many parts of the world, both new and established distance teaching universities, are placing great emphasis on reviewing and revising what they do in…

This document reports the findings of a survey of EE (environmental education) coordinators in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in order to better understand the current practice of EE teacher inservice education and to identify critical, future directions for inservice programs. Survey results suggest there are vital gaps. To improve…

In the 1990s, accountability initiatives emphasize local problem solving and decision making. This report describes recent efforts in Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) states to increase local accountability for student learning, with emphasis on the "reward-and-sanction" programs that some states are including in their education…