Kindergarten Entry Assessments (KEAs) have grown in popularity over the past decade due to the Race to the Top -- Early Learning Challenge Grant offered by the U.S. Department of Education in 2015. This study addresses kindergarten teachers' perceptions of data from North Carolina's school readiness assessment and their perceptions of what…

Special education teachers must have the skills to design and deliver intensive interventions for students with severe and persistent learning and behavioral needs. To ensure effective instruction for these students, preservice preparation programs must provide their teacher candidates with opportunities to learn, apply, and practice intensive…

"Teacher-Powered Practices: How teacher teams collaboratively lead and create student-centered schools" focuses on how innovative teachers are radically changing the ways schools are designed and run. The how here are the common practices, structures, and processes teacher-powered teams design and use daily. The guide identifies nine…

In this paper, we compare and contrast our experiences in using standards-based grading in different courses and across two separate institutions to explore the related tradeoffs and subtleties in designing and implementing such grading systems, guided by innovation diffusion theory. We summarize our individual courses, use Linda Nilson's criteria…

"The First-Year Seminar: Designing, Implementing, and Assessing Courses to Support Student Learning and Success," a five-volume series, is designed to assist educators who are interested in launching a first-year seminar or revamping an existing program. Each volume examines a different aspect of first-year seminar design or…

This volume reports on innovative, useful evaluation work conducted within U.S. college foreign language programs. An introductory chapter scopes out the territory, reporting key findings from research into the concerns, impetuses, and uses for evaluation that FL educators identify. Seven chapters then highlight examples of evaluations conducted…

Much has been written about the characteristics of effective college teachers. However, skill sets have not yet been defined with any level of specificity. Also, instructors at community colleges have unique working conditions and challenges that influence how they teach. This paper illustrates the use of three studies conducted to build and…

Researchers demonstrated a quarter century ago that schools could effectively employ value-added statistical methods. At the time, only a few states and districts had accumulated the necessary annual assessment data to take advantage of the breakthrough. Today, every state has the capacity to provide educators with value-added data. Yet most…

As the 21st century's first decade draws to a close, America's public school students are participating in online academic classes in increasingly large numbers. More than one million K-12 public school students took online courses in the 2007-2008 school year, according to an estimate in a recent Sloan Consortium survey. This represents a 47…

This manual is about the assessment, evaluation, and documentation of literacy development and growth in a student's early years of public schooling in North Carolina and is aligned with and complements the state's revised English Language Arts Standard Course of Study and Grade Level Competencies. The manual offers a perspective for change and…

The purpose of this handbook, is to assist teachers in assessing their students in reading, regardless of the grade level or subject they teach. It is intended as a starting point on the journey to helping students become effective readers, regardless of the material they are reading. SERVE, one of the Regional Educational Laboratories, has…

Since its creation in 1987, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) has implemented a national voluntary system to assess and certify teachers who meet rigorous teaching standards. Testimony from over 16,000 NBPTS certified teachers has revealed that the journey toward certification is often difficult, time-consuming, and…

This profile is designed to be a recording sheet for monitoring an individual student's progress throughout the school year. Seventh grade assessment materials and the Strategies for Instruction in Mathematics suggest tasks and questions that can be used for on-going and summative assessment. Directions for use and descriptions of the four levels…

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, founded in 1987, serves as a clearinghouse for National Board Teacher Certification whereby individuals must demonstrate competence and professional teaching excellence through a two-part process. Accordingly, this particular advanced level of teacher certification has perpetuated the…

This document is the result of an extensive effort to design an assessment program in communication skills and mathematics for first and second graders. It contains resource materials and instruments that school systems can use in their assessment programs. The resource materials include strategies for teachers to use in evaluating student…