The lobby of the college building echoes with the noise of teenagers milling around a table filled with books. Hands flutter over the bright covers, picking them up, flipping them over, thumbing through pages. Welcome to an Elon Academy Saturday at break time, the mid-point pause in this monthly gathering of the more than 70 student participants…

Like the ancient sailor in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" who lamented, "water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink," many teachers feel awash in a sea of assessment data that they don't know how to use. Part of the solution, Fisher and Frey claim, is for educators to understand the three components of any effective…

New technology-enabled assessments offer the potential to understand more than just whether a student answered a test question right or wrong. Using multiple forms of media that enable both visual and graphical representations, these assessments present complex, multistep problems for students to solve and collect detailed information about an…

As a classroom teacher, Kari Smith realized that traditional objective tests don't always assess what students actually know. But tests are so deeply embedded in the education system that it would be difficult to do away with them entirely. Smith decided to make tests into learning tools. In this article, Smith describes three strategies for…

Professional assessment organizations almost universally endorse the use of multiple measures for making education decisions. In practice, however, the concept of multiple measures is defined and applied in many different ways, depending on how we answer two questions--What counts as a "measure"? and How are the multiple measures…

Because they focus on the quality of instruction, teacher evaluations can be powerful catalysts for teacher and school improvement. But today, the typical teacher evaluation consists of a single, fleeting classroom visit by an administrator untrained in evaluation. Often he or she wields a checklist of classroom conditions and teacher behaviors…

Japan's elementary and junior high schools have a formal, nationally mandated moral curriculum called Kokoro-no-kyoiku--education of the heart. Japanese educators include moral growth as an integral part of one's intellectual growth and believe that democratic societies must promote virtuous decision making. Moral education in Japan nurtures the…

Describes attributes and practices of caring principals. Includes balancing conflicting demands, shielding the school from outside pressures, promoting rigor, and maintaining a caring mind-set. (PKP)

Educators and governments are paying increasing attention to international comparisons as they seek to develop effective policies to improve the performance of their education systems. Data from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are useful in revealing best practices across the world. Current data show that the United…

Although some competent paleontologists question the role of natural selection in evolution, they do not question question evolution itself. (Author/JM)

Describes how content-area teachers can use recreational reading to improve adolescent reading and writing skills. Provides several examples. (Contains 17 references.) (PKP)

Describes how data-warehousing technology can improve teacher effectiveness by providing means to compare student test scores among teachers. (PKP)

Describes theme schools developed for students in Dearborn (Michigan) Public Schools, such as an elementary school for science and a high school for engineering and technology. Includes a discussion of benefits and challenges. (PKP)

Describes benefits of entrepreneurship education. Includes some examples of how entrepreneurship education can be added to the middle-school curriculum. (PKP)