This study obtained basic information from teachers and students on the challenges and prospects of implementing continuous assessment (CA) in the Nigerian school system. Secondary Schools in Ilorin, the capital city of Kwara State, located in the central region of Nigeria were sampled for use in the study. It employed survey research design…

The purpose of this paper was to provide a demonstration of the assessment methods and processes that are used by the John L. Grove College of Business to assess student outcomes and how these assessments relate to mission and strategy.

Under accreditation standards, journalism and mass communication programs are required to regularly assess student learning and utilize results to improve curriculum and instruction. This case study examined how an accredited journalism program utilized internships in outcomes assessment. The study revealed that the program used internships as an…

The focus of this dissertation is on performance indicators--specifically, retention and graduation indicators--that impact allocation of the ever-dwindling public sources of money. Decreasing revenue trends make understanding the performance indicators that are often used to fund postsecondary institutions very important. There is a significant…

The College Board College Readiness Pathway is an assessment system that measures the reading, writing and mathematical knowledge and skills that students need to be on track to graduate high school college-ready. It consists of ReadiStep[TM], administered in grade eight; the PSAT/NMSQT[R], administered in grades 10-11; and the SAT[R],…

The Carnegie Learning Cognitive Tutor curricula are based on cognitive models, which include a representation of the learner's thinking, strategies, and misconceptions. The Cognitive Tutor curricula typically speed up learning and yield greater learning as compared to traditional math curricula (Morgan & Ritter, 2002; Sarkis, 2004; Koedinger,…

This study explored preservice teachers' views of intelligence. Specifically, I was interested in whether preservice teachers believed that intelligence was changeable (incremental) or fixed (entity). Dweck and colleagues found that people view traits like intelligence as either fixed or incremental (Dweck & Leggett, 1988; Dweck, Chiu, & Hong,…

"Race to the Top"(RTT) asks that states "design and implement rigorous, transparent, and fair evaluation systems for teachers and principals that differentiate effectiveness using multiple rating categories that take into account data on student growth…as a significant factor." In its definition of student growth, RTT makes the…

The Second Information Technology in Education Study (SITES) 2006 results reveal that principals' perceived presence of lifelong learning-related pedagogical activities in their schools had changed markedly since the same data was collected in 1998 in SITES-M1. More intriguing was the fact that the directions of the changes were quite different…

Motivated by Gibbons et al.'s (Appl. Psychol. Meas. 31:4-19, "2007") full-information maximum marginal likelihood item bifactor analysis for polytomous data, and Rijmen, Vansteelandt, and De Boeck's (Psychometrika 73:167-182, "2008") work on constructing computationally efficient estimation algorithms for latent variable…

The characteristics of written comments on assignments as well as the process of writing them were studied. Interviews to three case-study middle school students, observation of lessons and content analysis of their assignments show that features that promote learning are: comments located next to what needs revision must be reviewed; use of…

Evaluation in environmental education is fairly nascent despite decades-long attention to its importance. In setting the context for future chapters appearing in this special issue of the "Journal of Evaluation and Program Planning," attention is devoted to the political circumstances associated with retrenchment in the public sector and increased…

This study provided preliminary evidence for the reliability and validity of "Teaching Strategies GOLD", a recently developed observational system for assessing young children's development and learning. The measurement properties of "Teaching Strategies GOLD" were compared with those of an older instrument, "The Creative…

The current educational reform policy discourse takes for granted the central role of using data to improve instruction. Yet whether and how data inform instruction depends on teachers' assessment practices, the data that are relevant and useful to them, the data they typically have access to, and their content and pedagogical knowledge. Moreover,…

The National Education Monitoring Project (NEMP) is responsible in New Zealand for the national assessment of primary school children's achievement in the essential learning areas, one of which is social studies. Individual interviews are one of the approaches used to assess students' understanding. The assessors are registered teachers, selected…