This article reports on an interview with Marcia McCaffrey, the state arts consultant for the New Hampshire Department of Education and current president of the State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education (SEADAE). The discussion revolved around how the new arts standards may interact with evolving structures of arts teacher evaluation…

As children transition from Early Childhood Intervention Services to public education, it is critical that the results from the assessment practices used to identify children for services in public education are translated into instructional techniques that early childhood educators are able to implement in the classroom setting. This article aims…

As the internationally benchmarked Common Core State Standards, or CCSS, are adopted in states across the country, educators are seeking ways to support an increasingly diverse student population to meet these more demanding expectations. The likelihood that students will achieve the aims of the standards will be substantially shaped by how well…

The assessment of learning objectives has become an important element in the improvement and accreditation of academic programs, including information systems (IS). Indirect assessments have been common in these endeavors, but direct assessments have been sparse. In the first semester at Brigham Young University (BYU), IS students take four…

The problem of bias in qualitative research particularly is still debated in methodology texts and there is a lack of agreement on how much researcher influence is acceptable, whether or not it needs to be "controlled", and how it might be accounted for. Denzin (1994) refers to this as the "interpretive crisis" (p. 501). I…

This article describes what is known about ways in which middle and secondary school educators have improved curricula, instruction, and assessment practices and reorganized to achieve increased collaboration and responsiveness for all students' needs. It describes seven prominently used instructional strategies and four reorganization strategies…

Explains how working on a student newspaper provides students with real-life writing situations that make composition practice, which students usually begrudge, automatic and necessary. Reviews four aspects of putting a newspaper together: brainstorming, researching, drafting, and publishing. (TB)

This article describes an innovative pedagogical strategy, the use of teaching portfolios in peer interviews. It will first describe the process designed to prepare preservice teachers to demonstrate professional competence through the use of a standards-based working portfolio developed during a reading practicum. Then it will report on…

An ideal companion to "Academic Skills Problems, Third Edition," this user-friendly workbook offers numerous opportunities for practicing and mastering direct assessment and intervention procedures. Practice exercises and forms--some of which are reprinted from the text--are presented in a convenient 8 1/2" x 11" format with…

Teacher assessment programs of four Florida school systems that have attempted to link teacher assessment, development, and school improvement are described and their efforts evaluated. Common components are identified, with collaboration, professional development, and accountability being among the most important. Each system addressed school…

Authentic assessment is a process involving multiple forms of performance measurement reflecting student learning, achievement, motivation, and attitudes. This article examines types of authentic assessment (interviews, story or text retelling, writing samples, projects and exhibitions, experiments and demonstrations, constructed response items,…

The purpose of this paper is to review the theoretical and empirical literature relevant to language performance assessment. Following a definition of performance assessment, this paper considers: (1) theoretical assumptions underlying performance assessment; (2) purposes of performance assessment; (3) performance assessment procedures; (4) merits…

Data was released from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in the 1980s that showed a decrease in students' problem-solving abilities and conceptual understanding but an increase in performance on items requiring lower-ordered thinking skills. To address this decline in performance, leading disciplinary organizations, such as…