There is a growing emphasis on the right to and the benefits of education for young people within refugee camps. The benefits include physical and cognitive protection as well as the promotion of a sense of normalcy and feelings of hope. Minimum standards for refugee youth have been developed, which the authors argue should be used by not only by…

This paper provides a critical analysis of New Zealand's Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF). The first section sketches the development and implementation of the PBRF. The second section evaluates the scheme, concentrating on three themes: the relationship between privatization, competition and research performance; the standardization of…

The state with the largest public higher education system in the nation takes important steps toward establishing a statewide accountability model.

The concept of capacity, its ethical mandates, and a rationale for the assessment of capacity to execute a health care proxy was discussed. Special New York State regulations, relevant to the execution of a health care proxy by persons who have mental retardation, were reviewed, discussed, and compared with regulations in some other jurisdictions.…

This paper examines paradigm proliferation in the context of ongoing efforts by the federal government in the US to regulate academic research. It argues that these efforts amount to an attempt to reposition and de-center universities as sites of knowledge production, not just about education but across domains. The paper examines this politics as…

While Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) have become widely used to assess clinical competence at the end of undergraduate medical courses, the method of setting the passing score varies greatly, and there is no agreed best methodology. While there is an assumption that the passing standard at graduation is the same at all medical…

This article reports the code of conduct for higher education students which was issued by the Ministry of Education in March 2005. These are: (1) to heighten ambition and strengthen faith; (2) to love one's country and serve the people; (3) to study diligently and strive without rest; (4) to follow the rules and obey the laws; (5) to be honest…

The objective of this study was to determine the degree to which recommendations for passing scores, calculated on the basis of a traditional standard-setting methodology, might be affected by the mode (paper versus computer-screen prints) in which test items were presented to standard setting panelists. Results were based on the judgments of 31…

There is widespread agreement that theories of teaching, learning, and assessment should be consistent with a certain theory of learning, whether it be constructivism or some other theory. This paper describes the creation and development of the working draft of the assessment standards for school mathematics published by the National Council of…

In 1991 the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) released a report interpreting the achievement of U.S. students in mathematics on the 1990 National Assessment of Educational Progress in terms of a set of performance standards. The NAGB had been designing and implementing an approach to defining basic, proficient, and advanced levels of…

Setting performance standards on constructed-response assessments involving polytomously scored exercises presents a challenge for measurement practitioners. Some standard setting methods designed for use with multiple-choice, dichotomously scored assessments entail aggregating item performance estimates across a panel of experts. For these items,…

Four procedures were used to estimate a criterion-referenced standard for a multiple-choice examination developed by the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME). Two experimental procedures, the NBME method and a modification of the Guerin method, and the Angoff and Ebel procedures were evaluated on the consistency of the estimates they…

The accuracy of standards obtained from judgmental methods is dependent on the quality of the judgments made by experts throughout the standard setting process. One important dimension of the quality of these judgments is the consistency of the judges' perceptions with item performance of minimally competent candidates. Several interrelated…

This special issue covers recent technical developments in the field of criterion-referenced testing. An introduction, six papers, and two commentaries dealing with test development, test score uses, and evaluation of scores review relevant literature, offer new models and/or results, and suggest directions for additional research. (SLD)

Minimum standards were established for the National Teacher Examinations (NTE) by teacher educators instructed in the use of the Angoff, Nedelsky, or Jaeger procedures. The anticipated failure rates, the psychometric characteristics of the ratings, and other factors suggest the Angoff procedure yields the most defensible standards for the NTE area…