The Common Core State Standards, released in June 2010, offer an opportunity to shift education away from shallow, test-prep instruction and toward a focus on key cognitive skills, writes Conley. Two consortia of states are now developing common assessments to measure these standards--assessments that will be designed to capture deeper, more…

Schools have long made use of digital technologies to support the co-ordination of management and administrative processes--not least "management information systems", "virtual learning environments" and other "institutional technologies". The last five years have seen the convergence of these technologies into…

Much ado has been made about setting high standards over the past year. Current conversations about creating a common national standard largely focus on the substantive curriculum to be taught at various grade levels. Even more important is each state's expectations for student performance with respect to the curriculum, as expressed through its…

The latest draft of proposed common academic standards offers more-detailed expectations of what students should know and be able to do by the end of high school in math and language arts, but also notes that some decisions about curricula should be left to individual states and schools. The new version, released for public comment last week, is…

Many of the criticisms of Stoesz and Karger contained within their article titled "Reinventing Social Work Education" and focused against the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) are misdirected. The CSWE accreditation mandate does not extend to the publishing records (or lack thereof) of social work faculty or deans, to the GRE scores of…

In this article we address the issue of consistency in standard setting in the context of an augmented state testing program. Information gained from the external NRT scores is used to help make an informed decision on the determination of cut scores on the state test. The consistency of cut scores on the CRT across grades is maintained by forcing…

The Association for Specialists in Group Work (ASGW) supports the practice of ethical and effective group work through the publication of guiding principles in planning, performing and processing group work. Originally prepared, approved and published in 1998 (ASGW; Rapin and Keel), the current revision addresses changes in the American Counseling…

In this article, the author discusses her experiences on the committee charged with writing the first ever Arkansas State Frameworks for Information Literacy. She compares her work on the Arkansan frameworks with her work on the committee that wrote the new American Association of School Librarians (AASL) "National Standards for the…

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has recently announced a proposal that will require all public companies to report their financial data in Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). XBRL is an extension of Extensible Markup Language (XML). Moving to a standard reporting format makes it easier for organizations to report the…

On November 2, 1996, the Interstate School Leadership Licensure Consortium (ISLLC), a program of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), adopted a set of Standards for School Leaders (CCSSO, 1996). By 2005, 41 states had adopted or adapted these Standards (Sanders & Simpson, 2005). However, after almost a decade of experience with…

In today's difficult economic times, it behooves every program to be prepared to defend its worth. In the higher education arena, evidence of the attainment of our goals for student learning and development are best attained through the assessment of learning and development. Advising is a useful learning, development and retention tool that many…

The aim of this study is to standardize Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) scores within a large sample to approximate an autism severity metric. Using a dataset of 1,415 individuals aged 2-16 years with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) or nonspectrum diagnoses, a subset of 1,807 assessments from 1,118 individuals with ASD were divided…

Stoesz and Karger contend that the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) has promulgated accreditation mechanisms and processes that have failed to assure sufficient quality in social work education. Although certain of their conclusions are subject to challenge, their central propositions are credible and warrant serious consideration on the…

In the past decade, there has been an increasing level of distress over the perceived lack of ethics exhibited by members of the accounting profession. This distress has resulted in a call for a greater emphasis on ethics coverage as part of a college-level accounting education. However, one could argue that the various organizations that are…

(Purpose) After an extensive search, which included the Internet, four state Departments of Education, and national and state agencies for the gifted, were told by a national agency for gifted children that no standards, specifically for gifted preschool children, existed. The purpose of this paper is to create standards for a preschool gifted…