The Early Literacy Program focuses on the development of early literacy skills, with additional emphasis on intervention for students at risk of not meeting grade-based reading benchmarks. Districts and charter schools (LEAs) assess, and report to the state, students' reading composites and benchmarks three (3) times a year using the Acadience…

Through our national thematic reports HM Inspectors of Education share their professional view on particular aspects of education. This report focuses on sharing the key features which, when taken together, make the greatest difference to using assessment effectively to improve learning and teaching and in turn, outcomes for children and young…

This paper presents a methodology for directly aligning 'can do' frameworks to each other. The methodology, inspired by the manual for relating examinations to the "Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment" (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 2009) and Kane's (2004, 2013) interpretative argument, takes…

For young Spanish-speaking children entering U. S. schools, it is imperative that educators foster growth in the home language and in the language of instruction to the fullest extent possible. Monitoring language development over time is crucial for promoting language development because it allows educators to individualize student instruction.…

Purpose: Prominent at the intersections of national educational agencies, higher education, and international educational performance assessments are two reform standards: "benchmarks" determining optimal student performance, and "empirical evidence" for determining the quality of reform practices. These two notions are often…

New Zealand secondary music teachers spend many hours each week in both preparing and training a variety of performance ensembles, often before school, during lunchtimes, after school, on weekends and during holidays. In many cases this can be regarded as unpaid labour, yet their efforts make a significant contribution to a school's life: its…

The aim of this paper is to propose an analytical framework of disciplinary learning outcomes that will facilitate our understanding of the nature of disciplines and their relationships. Application of the draft analytical framework, Anderson and Krathwohl's "Taxonomy of Educational Objectives" to engineering learning outcome reference…

Several large scale assessments include student, teacher, and school background questionnaires. Results from such questionnaires can be reported for each item separately, or as indices based on aggregation of multiple items into a scale. Interpreting scale scores is not always an easy task though. In disseminating results of achievement tests, one…

Aim/Purpose: This paper presents some of the issues that academia faces in both the detection of plagiarism and the aftermath. The focus is on the latter, how academics and educational institutions around the world can address the challenges that "follow" the identification of an incident. The scope is to identify the need for and…

Prominent student engagement theorist Nora (2011) cited the assertion that models of student engagement "such as those underlying the National Study of Student Engagement and the Community College Study of Student Engagement, are misspecified due to the lack of incorporation of culturally relevant variables" (p.127). The purpose of this…

Charter schools are tuition-free public schools operated by independent organizations. Freed from many rules and topdown policies constraining district-operated schools, charter school leaders have direct control over most school-level decisions. Indiana has the best charter school law in the country, according to the National Alliance of Public…

Listening is viewed as a receptive or passive skill that hard to be measured. Nevertheless, listening skill plays a big role in enhancing students' proficiency in English. Therefore, improving students' quality in listening is important. According to Al-Musalli, there are four sub-skills involved in listening: literal level, inferential level,…

The National Benchmark Test Project (NBTP) was commissioned by Higher Education South Africa in 2005 to assess the academic proficiency of prospective students. The competencies assessed include quantitative literacy using the NBTP QL test. This instrument is a criterion-referenced multiple-choice test developed collaboratively by South African…

To create their rankings, university-ranking agencies usually combine multiple performance measures into a composite index. However, both rankings and index scores are sensitive to the weights assigned to performance measures. This paper uses a stochastic dominance efficiency methodology to obtain two extreme, case-weighting vectors using the…

This guide and tool has been designed to support higher education institutions to review, or audit, their readiness to offer blended learning courses. Users of the guide and tool will benchmark their institution's status with blended learning across a range of categories that includes policy, infrastructure, partnerships, learner support,…