Since 1992, the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC) has supported nine teams that developed designs for high-performance schools. This workbook is a guide developed for NASDC and for school-based reformers. It presents a framework for student and program evaluation called progress assessment. Chapters 2 through 5 provide…

The growing demand for colleges and universities to be accountable to their publics and the recognition that assessment is of little value without a systematic planning effort have led many institutions to turn to the concept of Total Quality Management (TQM). This pamphlet discusses the process of adapting TQM to a typical community college, a…

Criticisms of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) have included speculation that the listening test places too much burden on short-term memory as compared with comprehension, that a knowledge of reading is required to respond successfully, and that many items appear to require mere recall and matching rather than higher-order…

This pamphlet describes the bases of the educational outcomes and indicators for students (including students with disabilities) developed by the National Center on Educational Outcomes. The importance of developing an outcomes and indicators model with a rationale, wording, and appearance that support a philosophy in which educational outcomes…

This booklet provides a brief description of secondary education in Switzerland. The publication is part of a series that seeks to make the public aware of the education systems and traditions in all signatory states to the European Cultural Convention and to outline the essential problems these systems presently are facing. This short booklet…

This booklet provides a brief description of secondary education in Austria. The publication is part of a series that seeks to make the public aware of the education systems and traditions in all signatory states to the European Cultural Convention and to outline the essential problems these systems presently are facing. This short booklet…

This booklet provides a brief description of secondary education in Germany. The publication is part of a series that seeks to make the public aware of the education systems and traditions in all signatory states to the European Cultural Convention and to outline the essential problems these systems presently are facing. This short booklet…

This booklet provides a brief description of secondary education in the Flemish Community of Belgium. The publication is part of a series that seeks to make the public aware of the education systems and traditions in all signatory states to the European Cultural Convention and to outline the essential problems these systems presently are facing.…

As constructed-response items become an integral part of educational assessments, setting student performance standards on constructed-response items has become an important issue. Two standard-setting methods, one used for setting standards on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading in grade 8 and the other used to set…

This paper reports 20 unsolved problems in educational measurement and points toward what seem to be promising avenues of solution. The first group of concerns involves validity, posing the problems of obtaining suitable validity criteria, determining and measuring the predictor variables that best characterize the traits and proficiencies of…

This document is the first volume of two that jointly report on schools engaged in systemic reform. "Volume I: Lessons Learned" provides an indepth analysis of restructuring efforts across 10 schools participating in the Every Student Succeeds (ESS) and other state-reform initiatives. Based on a 3-year study, the volume synthesizes the…

This document, the second of two volumes, contains individual profiles of 10 schools that participated in California's Every Student Succeeds (ESS) reform initiative. The ESS initiative created a network of schools to promote change efforts aimed at improving learning for at-risk students. The first phase of the study looked broadly at school…

The development of the Best Practice Descriptor Statements by the New South Wales (NSW) Department of School Education provides schools with a set of criteria that will help them to become not only self-managing but self-monitoring. In this context, schools will be able to report on the health of their organization, resource needs, and staff…

This book serves as a resource guide to help people engage in a healthy, informed discussion of restructuring possibilities. Its focus is on creating readiness for school restructuring, which differs from both renewal and reform. Each chapter is similar in structure and designed to stand on its own. Each is short enough to be quickly read and then…

This paper deals with the problems that arise in performance assessment from the granularity that results from having a small number of tasks or prompts and raters of responses to these tasks or prompts. Two problems are discussed in detail: (1) achieving a satisfactory degree of reliability; and (2) equating or adjusting for differences of…