A significant movement is underway across the nation to design K-12 assessment systems that better equip stakeholders to provide an equitable and excellent education to each child. While some of these innovations emerged before the pandemic, the massive disruption to instruction fueled a new urgency to rethink the potential of assessments to drive…

Balanced assessment systems provide feedback and support decision-making to improve instruction and learning. "Supporting Continuous Improvement Efforts Through Balanced Assessment Systems: Components, Integration, and High-Leverage Actions" outlines key features and components, integration of various assessment approaches, and guiding…

Preparing to become a music teacher educator is a complex process and one component of this process should be learning to model, demonstrate, and teach assessment practices to preservice music educators. The purpose of this exploratory qualitative study was to discover how, and to what extent, music teacher educators (MTEs) are educated about…

A growing number of states are interested in tracking the readiness of children entering kindergarten. In 2010, just seven states (Alaska, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Maryland, Minnesota, and Vermont) collected Kindergarten Entry Assessment (KEA) data for the purposes of aggregating data at the state level. Since this time, most states report…

Across the country, education leaders are adding their voices to the call to address the issue of overtesting in schools. To assist districts in ensuring they have a coherent assessment strategy in place and only administer tests that are useful and of high quality, Achieve developed the "Student Assessment Inventory for School…

This publication examines how some States and local educational agencies (LEAs) are implementing teacher evaluations that incorporate measures of student achievement. The information in this publication was collected in response to a technical assistance request to the Reform Support Network from Maryland. Education leaders charged with designing…

In designing multiple-measure evaluation systems for teachers and principals, one of the key questions to emerge is: how to obtain student growth data for teachers of academic subjects and grades not covered by statewide assessments. Race to the Top grantees that began early to implement new evaluation systems are well on their way to…

In a recent report entitled "All Together Now: Collaboration and Innovation for Youth Engagement,": the Commission on Youth Voting & Civic Knowledge concluded that civic education is a shared responsibility of schools and other institutions. Data suggests, however, that more work is required to provide all young people with the…

Preparing the next generation of Americans to engage in their communities civically and politically is a shared responsibility. Although civic education takes place every day in homes and community centers, our nation's K-12 schools are in a unique position to nurture and reinforce the civic development of all young people. States influence their…

In this study, the researcher explored collegiate faculty use and perception of learning- centered strategies to assess student performance on various learning tasks. Through this study, the researcher identified the assessment strategies that faculty participants most frequently used, as well as the strategies that they perceived to be most…

The methods of evaluating teacher preparation programs are becoming increasingly more reliant on student test data. These test data driven formats, however, are not appropriate for small colleges. Small colleges are currently left off the Tennessee Report Card on the Effectiveness of Teacher Training Programs because the colleges did not produce…

In this article, the author describes a project designed to take the dread out of discussion in a first-year interdisciplinary humanities course at Sewanee: The University of the South, a private liberal arts college in Tennessee. The Responsible Intellectual Discussion project, known as RID, was created in conjunction with the college's Eloquence…

Teaching matters. Study after study confirms that students who have high quality teachers make significant and lasting achievement gains. Those with less effective teachers play a constant game of academic catch-up. Having high quality teachers consistently tops parents' list of critical elements of an effective school. As the National Commission…

In the No Child Left Behind era of high-stakes testing, school administrators are facing their toughest challenge ever. They are being held accountable for the performance of their schools, yet current systems in public education typically fail to provide them with the appropriate tools to manage effectively. Although the classroom is where…

This paper presents a profile of Tennessee's Star-Quality Child Care Program prepared as part of the Child Care Quality Rating System (QRS) Assessment Study. The profile consists of several sections and their corresponding descriptions including: (1) Program Information; (2) Rating Details; (3) Quality Indicators for Center-Based Programs; (4)…