Central to many of the current developments in higher education is prior learning assessment (PLA). In the past several years, with new and ambitious degree completion goals for adults, the United States is witnessing what can only be called a surge of interest in PLA.

Starting in 1974, the "Council for Adult and Experiential Learning" (CAEL) has helped colleges and universities develop and expand their prior learning assessment (PLA) programs for adult and other non-traditional learners. In the past several years, with new and ambitious degree completion goals for adults, the U.S. is witnessing what…

Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to estimate the extent of "over-qualification" (i.e. holding a qualification which is above that required to gain entry to the job being done) and "skills under-utilisation" (i.e. being in a job which does not make use of the knowledge and skills possessed) in the United Kingdom and to…

Nurse education programs are implementing standardized assessments without evaluating their effectiveness. Graduates of associate degree nursing programs continue to be unsuccessful with licensure examinations, despite standardized testing and stronger admission criteria. This problem is also prevalent for LPN-to-RN education programs due to a…

Articles published between 2000 and 2008 in four major school psychology journals--"School Psychology Review," "Journal of School Psychology," "Psychology in the Schools," and "School Psychology Quarterly"--were classified based on type (empirical or narrative) and on the primary and secondary authors' affiliations. Results showed that more than…

In large-scale assessments, such as state-wide testing programs, national sample-based assessments, and international comparative studies, there are many steps involved in the measurement and reporting of student achievement. There are always sources of inaccuracies in each of the steps. It is of interest to identify the source and magnitude of…

Purpose. The purpose of this study was to discover how coach training experts define coaching and what they would identify to be the essential components of a coach training program for mental health professionals. Methods. A panel of nine experts, through an iterative Delphi process of responding to three rounds of questionnaires, provided…

Brent Ruben introduces readers to a framework that surveys, summarizes, and synthesizes a broad cross section of the contemporary writings on leadership. The book organizes that literature into five broad competency areas, each of which is composed of a number of themes, and provides a Leadership Competencies Scorecard Inventory that allows…

This report contains the results of a pilot survey of employer satisfaction with Connecticut's public college graduates from the class of 2003 conducted by the Department of Higher Education (DHE) in the spring of 2005. The project was part of a four-state project entitled, "Defining Best Practices for Responsible Accountability Models in…