This study uses longitudinal data from Mexico's Carrera Magisterial teacher incentive program to identify teacher attributes that are positively associated with student test scores and to describe how teachers with these attributes are distributed across schools in two diverse Mexican states, Aguascalientes and Sonora. I find that teachers' scores…

Statistical modeling of school effectiveness data was originally motivated by the dissatisfaction with the analysis of (school-leaving) examination results that took no account of the background of the students or regarded each school as an isolated unit of analysis. The application of multilevel analysis was generally regarded as a breakthrough,…

Using data from the 2006 cohort of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, we examined the relationships between three approaches to measuring student learning outcomes (direct-assessment learning gains, self-reported gains, and college grades) and student persistence from the first to second year. Results from a series of logistic…

Over the last decade, the changes in Lithuanian pre-school and pre-primary education have been predetermined by changes in paradigms of children's education and strategic education documents that provided for guidelines of high quality children's (self-)education, an increasing attention of society to the quality of children's education, training…

What is formative assessment? Why do we do it and what do students gain? Formative assessment is not a one-time event. It is not the product or end result of a set of well-defined steps. Rather, formative assessment is a process identified in this resource as INFORMative assessment when it is a collection of strategies that engage teachers and…

College readiness, operationally defined by David Conley (2007), one of the contemporary "thought leaders" in the measurement of college readiness, as "the level of preparation a student needs in order to enroll and succeed--without remediation--in a credit-bearing general education course at a postsecondary institution that offers a baccalaureate…

The 2011 National Adult Learners Satisfaction-Priorities Report presents the responses to the Adult Learner Inventory[TM] (ALI) of 29,679 students from 61 four-year private and public as well as 4,749 students from 18 two-year community and technical colleges. The results include adult learner responses over a three-year time period, from fall of…

This report for Australia forms part of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Review on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes. The purpose of the Review is to explore how systems of evaluation and assessment can be used to improve the quality, equity and efficiency of school education. The…

The purpose of this paper is to help countries understand some of the "key principles and characteristics of an effective student assessment system". The focus is on assessment of student learning and achievement at the K-12 level. The paper extracts principles and guidelines from countries' experiences, professional testing standards,…

Each time a provincial budget is released, along with it comes a "service plan" for each of the ministries. It is supposed to be the minister's accountability report. So what's new this year? Unlike some previous plans where teachers were not even mentioned, this time teachers are referred to several times in the report. The purpose for…

In an effort to ensure fair preparation and selection of high school applicants to college, a committee of university and secondary school leaders after significant discussion and dialogue organized in 1900 the College Entrance Examination Board, known today as simply the College Board. The presentation will highlight the topics of this discussion…

It is important to evaluate Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRISs) so that policy makers and stakeholders can learn how well they are working and how they might be improved. Well-designed QRIS evaluations go beyond a "pass/fail" judgment to identify implementation successes and problems and assess what needs to be done to improve…

To evaluate the implications of deliberate practice when teaching test administration skills, novice, but trained, graduate student examiners administered intelligence tests to a convenience sample of volunteer school-age examinees assigned to a first test session. A second, different convenience sample of volunteer school-age examinees were…

Robin Conway's interest in student-led enquiry derived from a concern to encourage his students to take much more responsibility for their own learning. Here he explains how his department gradually learned to entrust students with defining the enquiry questions and planning the kinds of teaching and learning activities to be used over the course…

Building ontology in the domain of human sciences can be a difficult process because of the different meanings given to the same key concepts in these disciplines: in fact, shared meaning is an important element in knowledge construction between members of a community. In this paper, we propose a participatory social environment called…