For the last 40 years, business leaders, philanthropists, and a host of nonprofit advocacy groups have pushed for higher standards, academic rigor, standardized testing, and newer models of educating children. But, today, some of these reformers are feeling disillusioned and believe that the investments intended to transform education and provide…

This article describes standardised testing in Denmark and the protections guaranteed to avoid "high stakes". It explains the use of computer-based "adaptive tests" which adjust to an appropriate level for each student. It is an abbreviated version of an article from 2011 in the "Journal for Applied Testing…

The complexities of adapting traditional educational courses to a virtual setting highlighted numerous inequalities within the current United States' K12 school system. Students in low socioeconomic communities have suffered a more significant academic slide in core competencies due to poor lesson integration, online learning fatigue, poor…

Test-optional and test-blind admissions policies accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic would appear to imperil College Board's SAT college-entrance exam, the rival ACT, and their respective parent organizations. This state of affairs follows years of complaints that the exams favor the affluent. And, in fact, both of the notoriously secretive…

This series of rapid briefs is being developed by the Wisconsin-Minnesota Comprehensive Center - Region 10 (WMCC10). The purpose of these briefs is to provide succinct and timely guidance on best practices for schools and school-based early learning programs regarding the assessment of student learning, with the goal of informing instructional…

Selection decisions have a major impact on our education, occupation, and quality of life, and the role of standardized tests in selection has always been a source of controversy. Here, I consider various definitions of fairness in measurement and selection--those emerging from within educational measurement and statistics, those from philosophy,…

Assessments are a way for stakeholders in education to understand what students know and can do. They can take many forms, including but not limited to paper and pencil or computer-adaptive formats. However, assessments do not have to be tests in the traditional sense at all; rather, they can be carried out through teacher observations of students…

The field of early childhood and its teacher education programs, globally, have experienced intensified policy reforms to "professionalize" the workforce. This has had (un)intended consequences of standardizing how Latinx preservice educators in the United States have learned about engaging in early years education and care. To discuss…

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced students across Indonesia to study from home. As of September 11, 2020, Indonesia has reported more than 210,000 cases, the second highest in Southeast Asia. The pandemic and the obstacle of online learning caused the Indonesian government to take some action. The chronology of the education policy and online…

Faced with standardized writing tests, students must write on demand to prompts they haven't chosen. While students have little control over the prompts they must answer or the time and space limitations in which they must answer them, students and teachers have opportunities for meaningful resistance to standardized writing tests in reconsidering…

This article presents a didactic situation focused on geometric reasoning using 3D GeoGebra, using the concepts Theory of Didactical Situations (TDS). The objective of this work is to bring a didactic proposal for the teaching of Spatial Geometry, working with the students' geometric perception, oriented and elaborated based on the dialectic of…

Although twice exceptional students are gradually receiving more recognition and intervention, they are still a grossly underserved segment of the school population. "A Call to Action: Identification and Intervention for Twice and Thrice Exceptional Students" begins with basic information about twice exceptional students--students who…

This paper follows on from the previous bulletin (Redford 2019), which covered the education remit of the Parliament's Education and Skills Committee between February 2019 to July 2019. The following bulletin covers the Education remit of the Education and Skills Committee from August 2019 to January 2020. [For the previous bulletin (v51 n2 2019),…

When COVID-19 forced a hiatus in federally mandated assessments in spring 2020, it interrupted a quarter century of effort to track, disaggregate, and publicize achievement levels at the school level. The aborted school year put a big data gap where 2020 scores should have been. Combined with the already raging assaults on testing, state education…

As state and national curriculum standards continue to change, it is important for teachers to develop a common set of definitions for terms that appear in those standards. This column describes the four modes of discourse--narrative, descriptive, exposition, and persuasion--and links them to a variety of genres students can write in to compose…