As more states have become engaged in kindergarten assessment efforts, early childhood educators and assessment experts have recommended developing such efforts within a coordinated assessment system that provides data about children's progress over time, (pre-k through grade 12), and is designed to address both educational policy and practice…

Knowing that grades can have long-term consequences for students, teachers voice concern about being fair in the grading process. However, their interpretations of fairness are varied and sometimes contradictory. This study looked at how teachers in one standards-based educational system determined secondary students' grades, focusing specifically…

Making Consistent Judgments (MCJ) was a systemic professional development program designed to increase teachers' capacity to make consistent judgments about students' achievement of educational standards in government schools in Western Australia; the MCJ program was in operation from 2004 to 2007 (Department of Education and Training 2007; 2008).…

America's public schools are required to provide equal access to an education for all students. This study, in the form of an executive position paper, focused on how a large suburban school district having a small but diverse English language population should provide that equal access in order to address the academic needs of its current…

The Early Childhood Educator Survey and the Early Childhood Administrator Survey allow users to collect consistent data on the use of child assessments and learning standards in early childhood learning settings. Each survey includes modules on educator/administrator background information, assessment use, and learning standards implementation.…

Policy makers and researchers now recognize that designing effective institutions to govern policy networks is a major challenge of the 21st Century. Presently, the Common Core State Standards Initiative resembles an emerging network of organizations united around the goal of developing clear and challenging academic expectations for students in…

The Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) is working to comply with the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Improvement Act of 2006 (Perkins) to ensure that its graduates have mastered the technical skills needed by business and industry. The legislation requires that each state identify and approve program assessment strategies…

A group of teachers at Clifford Smart Middle School in Michigan's Walled Lake Consolidated School District have broken free from traditional grading in order to embrace a more meaningful grading practice. Using standards-based grading practices, they believe their grading now accurately communicates to students and parents the student's mastery…

The paper starts by emphasising that final year engineering projects are regarded important in the training and education of professional engineers in Australia and Europe. The sources of projects available to students were also mentioned. Some Australian universities insist on individual projects but some not, each with their own reasons.…

This study examined the multilevel factors that influence mathematics and English performance on the Primary Leaving Examinations (PLEs) among primary seven pupils (i.e., equivalent to the United States [U.S.] 7th graders) in Uganda. Existing student state test data from the Wakiso District were obtained. In addition, a newly created Teacher…

The New York Performance Standards Consortium includes urban public high schools that have successfully used a performance-based assessment option. Instead of exit exams, student assessments are based on specific performance-based assessment tasks. These schools have shown that it is possible to use qualitative data to make substantive decisions…

Thanks to China's reform and opening to the world over the last three decades, the conventional normal education system, which is characterized by independent orientation, is now being challenged by a comprehensive and multi-faceted modern teacher education system that has taken shape. It is high time that we attached great significance to the…

We use unique administrative data from a leading Italian university to estimate whether the use of admission tests and conditional progression schemes are effective strategies to select high-performing students. Previous work, which has been predominantly correlational, has focused on the effect of selectivity policies on widening university…

Competency education is student-centric, personalizing student progress so that every child has adequate time and support to reach proficiency every step of the way. Competency education fundamentally changes the way the educational enterprise is organized around student needs, and thus must have a dynamic IT system to support it. Following an…

Obtaining an accurate grade of how well students meet learning objectives is a non-negotiable principle of successful differentiation and allows assessment to inform practice at every turn. If the assessment instrument is inaccurate, it should be modified or dropped. In this article, the author contends that alternative assessments are the only…