From 2005 to 2018, AAC&U led a national public advocacy and campus-action initiative to champion the importance of a liberal education for individual students and for a nation dependent on economic creativity and democratic vitality. At the heart of the initiative-titled Liberal Education and America's Promise, or LEAP, was a distinctive…

This book explores how well teachers are prepared for professional practice. It is an outcome of a large-scale research and development program that has collected extensive data on the impact of the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment on Initial Teacher Education programs and preservice teachers' engagement with the assessment. It contributes…

The New Synthesis approach views learning as an active process by which learners create knowledge structures or mental representations. This book attempts to give classroom teachers alternative ways of assessing how their learners think, what they know, and what they can do. The chapters are: (1) "Teaching, Motivation, and Testing"; (2) "Academic…

This book is designed to help educators consider how assessment relates to instruction and recognize how assessment affects student learning. It intends to encourage teachers to establish a climate in which students can safely seek and use assessment information. A basic assumption is that learning occurs best in a positive setting, one that…

This comprehensive guide to alternative, authentic assessment in early childhood education provides discussions of the most current research and practical ways to integrate assessments into teaching. It shows assessment as a process that teachers can use in their own classrooms, using the latest procedures, such as portfolios, standards,…

This guide is a useful resource for educators who would like to begin using portfolios in the classroom. The three major types of portfolios are working portfolios (collections of work in progress), display portfolios (also called showcase or best works), and assessment portfolios. These types are distinct in theory, but tend to overlap in…

This book focuses on research conducted in the last 20 years that shows what urban teachers can do to add new knowledge and skills to their repertoire of teaching so that students can increase their own achievement. Dedicated to the idea that all children can learn, it provides hundreds of practical educational strategies. Some approaches that are…

For over thirty years, portfolios have been used to help adult learners gain recognition for their prior learning and take greater control of their educational experiences. The portfolio has become a distinctive means of assessing such learning, serving as a meaningful alternative to conventional papers and standardized testing. This book provides…

The Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center (the Met) is a unique public high school in Providence, Rhode Island. The Met has no classes, no grades, no tests, and no easy rides. With guidance from adults, each student builds a customized education focused on five learning goals: communication, social reasoning, empirical reasoning,…