Teacher evaluation reform has been among the most controversial education reforms in recent years. It also is one of the costliest in terms of the time teachers and principals must spend on classroom observations. We conducted a randomized field trial at four sites to evaluate whether substituting teacher-collected videos for in-person…

Preparing to become a music teacher educator is a complex process and one component of this process should be learning to model, demonstrate, and teach assessment practices to preservice music educators. The purpose of this exploratory qualitative study was to discover how, and to what extent, music teacher educators (MTEs) are educated about…

Purpose: Family support programs commonly use self-sufficiency matrices (SSMs) to measure family outcomes, however, validation research on SSMs is sparse. This study examined the reliability of the Colorado Family Support Assessment 2.0 (CFSA 2.0) to measure family self-reliance across 14 domains (e.g., employment). Methods: Ten written case…

States use their accountability systems to identify low-performing schools, which can receive added support and are expected to improve. Alternative schools serve students whose needs are not met in a regular school. They often serve at-risk students who are struggling academically or behaviorally. Given this unique population, the Government…

This issue brief discusses opportunities for states under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to redesign systems of assessments to support student-centered learning. In addition, this brief introduces "balanced systems of assessments" and "assessment literacy" as two key concepts required for long-term sustainable systems…

Contemporary perspectives on age differences in risk taking, informed by advances in developmental neuroscience, have emphasized the need to examine the ways in which emotional and cognitive factors interact to influence decision making. In the present study, a diverse sample of 901 individuals between the ages of 10 and 30 were administered a…

Every building, from the smallest school to the tallest skyscraper, uses energy. This energy is most often generated by burning fossil fuels, which releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and contributes to climate change. Existing commercial buildings offer a significant opportunity for low-cost, immediate emissions and energy cost…

It is important to be able to describe instructional practices accurately in order to support research on "what works" in education and professional development as a basis for efforts to improve practice. This report describes a project to develop procedures for characterizing classroom practices in mathematics and science on the …

This report is a case study of a technical evaluation assistance project in each of four states: Alabama, California, Colorado, and Maine. (The project activities in each state included the following: becoming acquainted with the vocational education delivery system and methods of evaluation; identifying problems associated with the evaluation…

This report covers the second year of work by the National Center for Research in Vocational Education in assisting states to increase their ability to evaluate programs and services for special populations. The report also provides information on changes that have occurred in the total evaluation system of the participating states since the start…