In many states, teacher candidates are required to complete the Education Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA). Faculty at a Midwestern university recently piloted implementing edTPA completion prior to student teaching and revealed (a) an easing of tensions associated with edTPA completion, (b) a positive impact on the student teaching…

Most biology undergraduates learn about mutations in multiple classrooms throughout their college career. Understanding personalised genome test results, genome editing controversies, and the appearance of new variants of viruses or antibiotic resistant bacteria all require foundational knowledge about mutations. However, the abstract nature of…

American Indian students continue to experience marginalization in settler-colonial school systems in the United States. American Indian students receive disciplinary punishment more frequently and harshly than white peers. Overrepresentation of American Indian students in school discipline is a byproduct of a long history of oppressive…

In December 2015, President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB), as the nation's major law governing public schools. ESSA retains the requirement that states test all students in reading and math in grades three through eight and once in high school, as well as the requirement that…

This project aimed to develop an engaging formative assessment that simulates the social and dialogic processes that are often missing in traditional instruction and assessment of argumentation. In this article, we describe the design of an argumentative reasoning task within a scenario-based assessment enhanced with game elements…

Increased accountability demands and an emphasis on raising achievement expectations for all students have made assessment leadership a critical part of the work of principals. Incentives from educational policies and standards are reinforcing the need for a better understanding of the role demands that either support or impede assessment…

Reading Apprenticeship is a research-based professional learning model and instructional framework designed by the Strategic Literacy Initiative (SLI) at WestEd to improve student literacy and learning. Based on understandings of the close relationship between curricular reform and professional development (Heller & Greenleaf, 2007), Reading…

In partnership with the National Charter School Resource Center (NCSRC), the National Association for Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) has been conducting authorizer assessments over the past six years. However, the correlation between high-quality authorization practices and charter school impact has largely been unexplored. This report uses a…

The Wisconsin K-12 Energy Education Program (KEEP) is a statewide education program located in the Midwest of the United States. The goal of the program is to leverage teacher education to improve and increase energy literacy in Wisconsin's K-12 schools as a means of contributing to statewide energy savings. Created in 1995, the program continues…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to examine the utility of framing formative feedback to improve school leadership with a focus on task-based evaluation of distributed leadership rather than on role-based evaluation of an individual leader. Research Methods/Approach: Using data from research on the development of the Comprehensive…

The purpose of this study is to elucidate the fundamental differences between elementary and secondary schools in distributed instructional leadership practices by comparing results determined by the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL) survey. The data set used in this study was derived from the 2011-1013 CALL survey: a…

Chemistry taught in high schools typically has group interaction components designed to provide opportunities for groups of two or more students to collaborate. Such opportunities, however, can lead to diminished learning among some students, as domination, group dissonance, and/or non-participation among group members can derail the collaborative…

The principles of course redesign that were applied to a gateway Cell Biology course at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee are applicable to courses large and small, and to institutions of any size. The challenge was to design a content-rich science course that kept pace with present and future content and at the same time use principles of…

The Next Generation Assessment Task Force was convened to formulate Wisconsin's path forward. Task force members listened to leaders from business and technology sectors as well as leaders from PK-12 and higher education. This summary shares the process, definitions, assumptions, and recommendations of the task force. This paper aims to use these…

Background: This article builds on three years of qualitative research on Wisconsin's Student Achievement Guarantee in Education (SAGE) program, a class size reduction policy in Wisconsin. Objective: In this article, we take a practice-oriented perspective on assessment, examining how assessments in schools that participated in a class size…