As institutions cope with the difficult task of managing scarce resources to support student learning, college writing centers, like other student services, need to be able to articulate and, at times, quantify the benefits they offer the populations they serve. This study examined outcomes associated with visiting the writing center at one…

The Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR)--defined as a verifiable, portable, interoperable digital asset that recognizes all learning--is currently a topic of interest in the postsecondary and workplace ecosystem. The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL) and The EvoLLLution conducted a survey of CAEL higher education members and The…

Many argue that the conventional high school transcript has become irrelevant to today's best practices in teaching, learning, and assessment. With more and more school leaders turning to alternate, competency-based approaches for learning, crediting and transcripts can follow suit by drawing on badging, micro-crediting, digital portfolios of…

American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) is developing guidance on a range of topics in support of institutions of higher education need to adjust, review and consider many of their practices in light of the impact of COVID-19 on normal operations. To help develop this guidance and the members understanding of…

World Education Services (WES) is a non-profit organization with over 40 years of experience in assessing academic credentials from more than 200 countries and jurisdictions and 40,000 educational institutions. Because many refugees are unable to obtain verifiable documents, the assessment of their qualifications calls for a different approach…

Colleges throughout the United States are evaluating the effectiveness of the strategies used to decide whether to place students into college-level or developmental education courses. Developmental, or remedial, courses are designed to develop the reading, writing, or math skills of students deemed underprepared for college-level courses, a…

World Education Services (WES) is a non-profit organization with over 40 years of experience in assessing academic credentials from more than 200 countries and jurisdictions and 40,000 educational institutions. Because many refugees are unable to obtain verifiable documents, the assessment of their qualifications calls for a different approach…

Data use is becoming a prominent strategy for educational innovation and improvement across countries. However, the fragmentation of data collection often hinders the capacity of policymakers, researchers and practitioners to access and analyse the wealth of data routinely generated in educational institutions. A critical step towards realising…

One of the US Department of Education's key priorities is turning around the nation's persistently low-achieving schools, yet exactly how to identify low-performing schools is a task left to state policy makers, and a myriad of definitions have been utilized. In addition, exactly how to recognize when a school begins to turn around is not well…

How many students repeat a grade each year? How do retention rates vary across states and over time? Despite extensive research on the predictors and consequences of grade retention, there is no systematic way to quantify state-level retention rates; even national estimates rely on imperfect proxy measures. We present a conceptually simple…

Although the Federal No Child Left Behind program judges the effectiveness of schools based on their students' achievement status, many policy analysts argue that schools should be measured, instead, by their students' achievement growth. Using a ten-year student-level panel data set from North Carolina, the authors examine how school-specific…

Three main purposes provided the foundation for this study. The first purpose was to investigate academic achievement through analyses of data obtained through formal and informal assessments among kindergarten through eighth grade students who participated in a Head Start program, center-based care program, or home-based care prior to school…

This paper concentrates on the public and formal processes of reporting achievement. The topic is significant because employers, managers and graduate schools all use warrants when making selection and governance decisions. Should those warrants turn out to have, as we argue, local meanings, then selection and governance practices, amongst others,…

An approach to improving classroom instruction is offered that advances a longitudinal, cyclical presentation of instruction, its evaluation, and revision over time. This approach is distinguished by student self-graphing of student performances, a teacher's log of changes made in instruction, and a class graph kept by the teacher or students. The…