A statewide coalition of nearly 50 experts -- including doctors, medical and environmental health researchers, educators, youth and community groups -- worked together to explore the challenges of climate change from the perspective of children's health and education. The insights and recommendations are published in this report. It is presented…

Amid fires, wildfire smoke, extreme heat, and other climate-driven disasters and health hazards, California's leading experts in children's health and education have come together to call for a cost-effective, ten year $150 billion investment to ensure K-12 public schools can remain open and provide safe and healthy places for California's…

The Mathematics Fluency and Calculation Tests (MFaCTs) are a series of measures designed to assess for arithmetic calculation skills and calculation fluency in children ages 6 through 18. There are five main purposes of the MFaCTs: (1) identifying students who are behind in basic math fact automaticity; (2) evaluating possible delays in arithmetic…

As educational practitioners and policymakers expand the range of student outcomes they assess, student perception surveys--particularly those targeting social-emotional learning--have grown in popularity. Despite excitement around the potential for measuring a wider array of important student outcomes, concerns about the validity of the…

Teacher observations have become a national education phenomenon, mandated by federal policies and promoted by philanthropists. They are crucial components of teacher evaluation systems that often have high stakes for teachers and school systems, but have sparked little innovation. Recent calls to make teacher evaluations better, faster, and…

This study examined the psychometric properties of the Therapeutic Alliance Scale for Caregivers and Parents (TASCP) in a sample of 209 caregivers whose children (4-13 years of age) presented with disruptive behavior problems to a publicly funded outpatient mental health clinic in San Diego County. Information about therapeutic alliance was…

Assessment systems that track children's progress across time need to be sensitive to the variegated nature of development. Although instruments are commonly designed to assess behaviors within a specific age range, some children advance slower or faster than others and, as a result, often show behaviors from a younger or older age group. This…

Social skills are an important part of development, and deficits in this area have long-term impacts on a child. As a result, clinicians should include a measure of social skills as part of a comprehensive assessment. There are a few well-researched measures of social skills that are currently used, including the Matson Evaluation of Social Skills…

This paper investigates whether inferences about school performance based on longitudinal models are consistent when different assessments and metrics are used as the basis for analysis. Using norm-referenced (NRT) and standards-based (SBT) assessment results from panel data of a large heterogeneous school district, we examine inferences based on…

This technical report summarizes the third independent factor analysis of the SERU/UCUES questionnaire responses of students with majors. The 2009 solution employed the same quantitative analysis used in the prior solutions--varimax orthogonal rotation to determine principal components followed by promax oblique rotation to identify…

Both California state law and the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) require that all schools assess the English language proficiency of newly enrolled students who speak a language other than English at home and, annually, all English learners (ELs) already enrolled. California meets this requirement by administering the California English…

The Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) argues that the most valid judgments of the creativity are those of the combined opinions of experts in the field. Yet who exactly qualifies as an expert to evaluate a creative product such as a short story? This study examines both novice and expert judgments of student short fiction. Results indicate a…

This paper reports on a study of the current state of the art in teaching assessment. The major goal of the study was to examine a sample of assessment systems and then develop a specification for a state-of the art performance assessment system to be used for human capital management functions. The authors hope was that this specification would…

Technologies like solar, wind, and geothermal are exciting, but relatively new and untested in the context of universities, many of which are large enough to be cities unto themselves. And, like cities, universities count on a reliable, uninterruptible source of power. It is imperative, too, that precious dollars are wisely invested in the right…

To empirically investigate language learning in relational and cultural settings, the authors developed and administered the Ecological Language Learning and Academic Success scale to an ethnically diverse sample of 269 urban high school students who speak a language other than English at home. Exploratory factor analysis revealed a four-factor…