Accreditation is a process of external quality review used by higher education education to scrutinize colleges, universities, and educational programs for quality assurance and quality improvement. In the United States, accreditation is carried out by private, nonprofit organizations designed for this specific purpose. Institutions and…

Purpose: Benchmarking, a method for quality assurance has not been very commonly used in higher education with regard to e-learning. Today, e-learning is an integral part of higher education, and so should also be an integral part of quality assurance systems. However, quality indicators, benchmarks and critical success factors on e-learning have…

New Canaan, Connecticut, is a community of approximately twenty thousand residents, located fifty miles northeast of New York City. It was ranked second in the nation as an education town within its demographic category, according to Schools.org. In 2005 the high school rolled out an interdisciplinary project with freshmen health teachers to embed…

Adopting technology in the K-12 classroom is evolving from adapting lessons that highlight a technology to pervasive use of interactive and handheld devices. In this environment, school leaders have the complex task of incorporating technologies to enhance teaching and learning. The purpose of this quasi-experimental quantitative study was to…

A US sample (N = 360) of psychology educators assessed 73 writing skills and competencies with regard to (a) the importance of each and (b) the typical performance of the top half of local psychology majors. An analysis of gap scores yielded results showing that specific skills, such as supporting claims with citations and proofreading ability,…

This paper is a self-reflection on the state of openness of the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU). An exploratory and descriptive study, it aims not only to define the elements of openness of UPOU, but also to unravel the causes and solutions to the issues and concerns that limit its options to becoming a truly open university.…

Increasing the rigor of learning tasks to align with the expectations in the Common Core State Standards presents challenges for many educators, particularly for middle and high school teachers of nonproficient readers. In this article, the authors describe a number of these challenges and identify four steps that together, create a systematic…

Nationally, both science and agricultural education professional organizations have identified agriculture as a fundamental technology to be studied by students, with the goal of achieving an understanding of the agri-food system necessary for democratic participation. Benchmarks representing the content that K-12 children need to understand about…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents the following articles: (1) "Just Right" Outcomes Assessment: A Fable for Higher Education (Catherine M. Wehlburg); (2) Editor's Notes: Helping Faculty Members Learn (Linda Suskie); (3) Focus on the Bottom-Line: Assessing Business Writing (Michael Cherry and George Klemic); (4)…

The objective of this paper was to develop a four dimensions dynamic model for designing instructional activities appropriate to electronic and virtual learning environments. The suggested model is guided by learning principles of cognitivism, constructivism, and connectivism learning theories in order to help online learners to build and acquire…

Internationalisation has transformed into mainstream strategy in higher education and is increasingly seen as adding value to the life of universities through improving its quality. But how do we assess the quality of internationalisation? This article evaluates a pilot project that aimed to qualitatively assess the internationalisation of…

The professional standards of school nursing practice provide a framework to help school nurses focus on their unique mission of promoting health and academic achievement for all students. Without the standards, the nurse’s role can become task oriented and limited in scope. By using an evaluation tool that reflects the standards, nurses not only…

Scope and Method of Study: This naturalistic inquiry case study explored a selected pre-kindergarten program and the extent of its provision for school readiness through the lens of General Systems Theory. Assessment results from kindergarten students at three separate elementary schools were analyzed, interviews were completed with select early…

Better teacher evaluation should lead to better instruction and improved outcomes for students, but more accurate classification of teachers requires better information than is now available. Because existing measures of performance are incomplete and imperfect, measured performance does not always reflect true performance. Teachers who are truly…

For the past 15 years, the New Zealand government has initiated major efforts to reduce persistently large inequities in achievement outcomes in literacy education, including the development of a national literacy strategy. The aim of this study was to provide an analysis of the factors that have contributed to the failure of this strategy and…