Candi Mascia Reed is a retired principal of programs for deaf and hard of hearing students in the Total Communication programs of Bergen County Special Services in the Hackensack School District in New Jersey. Currently, she is an adjunct professor at The College of New Jersey, Special Education Language and Literacy, Deaf Education Teacher…

This interview with James E. Purpura via Zoom comes in uncertain times, with CVOID-19 turning into a global pandemic. The author delves into different issues related to James E. Purpura's early career and his Language Assessment Quarterly (LAQ) editorial experience. Then moves on and talk about his research and teaching. The final part will…

Exciting developments for New Zealand education have provided opportunities recently for teachers and other educators to express their professional aspirations in assessment. The mantle of fostering teachers' professionalism through strong relationships across the education sector and relevant stakeholder groups, and the provision of timely…

In this forum, I expand upon Teo and Osborne's discussion of teacher agency and curriculum reform. I take up and build upon their analysis to further examine one teacher's frustration in enacting an inquiry-based curriculum and his resulting accommodation of an AP curriculum. In this way I introduce the concept of misrecognition (Bourdieu and…

This article describes the feelings of faculty members required to annually design an assessment project for each semester and report to the director of assessment the objectives and results of that project on a standardized form. What is misunderstood is that true assessment is part of the very "fiber of being" for many faculty members.…

There has been, and remains, much criticism of the external monitoring of the quality of universities' learning and teaching by bodies such as the QAA largely on the grounds that it is essentially a bureaucratic collection of data that does little, if anything, to help in improving or enhancing the learning and teaching. In this article, while…

Testing students once a year, with data reported many months later, is like using an autopsy to determine how to help a patient, says Cindy Ambrose, chief academic officer of the Horry County Schools in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. In Horry County and many other districts around the country, assessment that monitors vital signs on an ongoing…

A discussion on the increased use of objective grading techniques and disciplinary procedures to provide a safe and fair educational environment is given. An argument on such mechanistic procedures is presented, which could never be truly objective and that they would result in more harms than benefits.

From 1979-1982, ten American Association for State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) member institutions participated in developing a paradigm for evaluating student and program performance with respect to the intellectual abilities of communicating, quantifying, analyzing, synthesizing, and valuing. Faculty viewpoints toward the general process…

Describes how the English Department at Loyola University of Chicago, adopted assessment measures beneficial to the department's program and acceptable to administrators, faculty, and students. (TB)

Proposes that the literal process of reading is a far more active process than most would imagine. Attempts to establish a notion of a good reader as both a model for reading and a model for teaching. Contends that each person is deeply affected by the way he or she is "read" by others and that educators need to take care to "read" students…

My article set out a radical view of how I believe tests for students of EIL should change both immediately and in the longer term. Exam boards, as Lynda Taylor acknowledges, are by nature conservative, so it was welcome to see in her response signs that testers are beginning to change their attitude towards English language norms. Nevertheless,…

Contends that high stakes tests provide no useful or timely information to help teachers accomplish assessment goals, and they encourage an interactional climate that can undermine them. Outlines how assessments can improve learning. Concludes that since assessments of children, as enacted in classrooms, are part of the intellectual environment…

Systematic post-tenure evaluation, uniformly and universally applied, preserves the strengths of tenure while allaying public suspicions about tenure and concerns about faculty vigor and accountability. Failure to address increasing public concerns will otherwise increase the likelihood of external regulation. (MSE)

A New Zealand educator attributes end-of-school year feelings of guilt about things left undone, or things that should not have been done, to not practicing evaluation as part of planning. Suggests developing a framework that ensures certain beliefs and practices consistent with the curriculum requirements. Provides an example of such a framework.…