This technical report and user's guide is designed to provide researchers with an overview of the design and implementation of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), as well as with information on how to access the PISA 2009 data. This information is meant to supplement that presented in Organization for Economic Cooperation…

To gauge the civic knowledge and skills of the nation's 4th-, 8th-, and 12th-grade students, an assessment has been scheduled for 2006 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This assessment will enable NAEP to report on trends in civics achievement from 1998 to 2006. The National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), NAEP's…

Recent changes in educational assessment in France reflect pressures to modernize the French educational system to align it with prevailing democratic and egalitarian values and to respond to the economy's vocational training needs. After providing background on the French educational system, this paper discusses two areas of secondary school…

Data provided by the 1981-82 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were used to study the citizenship and social studies achievement of rural 13-year-olds. The NAEP extreme rural sample included 901 13-year-olds from schools in areas with less than 10,000 people and many farmers or farm workers in residence. School size in this sample…

Participants in this conference of educators, convened to consider methods of evaluating teacher education students, focused upon the relationship between candidate quality and teacher effectiveness. Questions under consideration included: (1) pre-admission field experiences students should demonstrate; (2) optimum scores on aptitude and…