Moving teacher evaluation systems from measuring teachers' performance to improving their practice requires much greater attention to communication and support. In the fall of 2012, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) instituted a sweeping reform of its teacher evaluation system with the introduction of REACH Students (Recognizing Educators Advancing…

After decades of disinterest, evaluation of the performance of elementary and secondary teachers in the United States has become an important educational policy issue. As U.S. states and districts have tried to upgrade their evaluation processes, one of the models that has been increasingly used is the Framework for Teaching. This paper summarizes…

The purpose of this brief is to understand the Illinois College and Career Readiness (CCR) Act in light of David Conley's college readiness model. Although not mentioned specifically by the Illinois statute, evaluation results gathered by the Office of Community College Research and Leadership (OCCRL) show alignment between a number of programs…

Digital learning makes possible the "unbundling" of school provisions--that is, it allows children to be served by providers from almost anywhere, in new and more customized ways. At the same time, because it destandardizes and decentralizes educational delivery, digital education is far harder to bring under the yoke of the…

Increased focus on assessment of student learning, within college classrooms, has lead many professors to routinely employ classroom assessment techniques as a means to make adjustments in teaching during the instructional process. This article describes a technique, Talking Drawings, which was developed by a high school teacher as a teaching…

Consisting of materials presented to the institute on evaluation of the Illinois gifted program, the document presents papers on educational evaluation and the evaluator's role in education. Also, the development of evaluation designs is considered and four evaluation plans are detailed. Questions regarding evaluation are listed; also listed…

A 2-week institute trained 30 public school personnel, all involved with the Illinois gifted program, as evaluators. An evaluation design, materials, and instruments were developed; the workshop evolved from evaluation planning to skill training in data gathering techniques. Evaluation in terms of each participant's local situation was stressed.…

"Assessing Expressive Learning" is the only book in the art education field to date to propose and support a research-supported teacher-directed authentic assessment model for evaluating K-12 studio art, and to offer practical information on how to implement the model. This practical text for developing visual arts assessment for grades…

Correlational analysis, classical test theory, confirmatory factor analysis, and multilevel Rasch modeling were used to refine a measure of adolescents' exposure to violence (ETV). Interpersonal violence could be distinguished from other potentially traumatic events; it was also possible to distinguish three routes of exposure (victimization,…

Findings of a study that incorporated a method for measuring the economic efficiency of K-8 school districts in Illinois are presented in this paper. The quadriform concept was used to identify four categories, or quadrants, for identifying school districts--technically efficient, low service, high service, and technically inefficient. The method…