The U.S. Department of Education (Department) Office of Inspector General (OIG) Strategic Plan for fiscal years 2018 through 2022 describes the focus and direction of OIG's operations over the next five years, establishes their organizational goals, and outlines the strategies they will employ to reach those goals and the measures they will use to…

The perceived value of postsecondary education to economic competitiveness and individual success is driving innovation in higher education. Competency-based education (CBE) is the latest disruption that seeks to respond to the growing sense of national urgency to boost education attainment. The target audience generally includes those adult…

A task force was created in a small, AACSB-accredited business school to develop a more comprehensive set of standards for faculty performance. The task force relied heavily on faculty input to identify and describe key dimensions that capture effective teaching and service performance. The result is a multi-dimensional framework that will be used…

Performance-based assessment clearly represents an indispensable approach for assessing gifted student learning. Challenging performance tasks allow gifted learners to reveal their considerable intellectual capacity and energy. Through performance tasks, teachers gain insights into a gifted student's true level of capability in a domain of…

The Adolescent Sexual Health Work Group commissioned the development of core competencies that define the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary for all providers of adolescent sexual and reproductive health. This article describes the background and rationale for this set of competencies, the history and use of competencies, and the process…

In the opening paper in this Special Edition I outlined the major issues that led to the establishment of "project e-scape". The project was intended to develop systems and approaches that enabled learners to build real-time web-based portfolios of their performance (initially) in design & technology and additionally to build systems…

Most innovations have contextual pre-cursors that prompt new ways of thinking and in their turn help to give form to the new reality. This was the case with the e-scape software development process. The origins of the system existed in software components and ideas that we had developed through previous projects, but the ultimate direction we took…

A total of 33 sites, including states, school districts, charter school coalitions, and other education organizations make up Cohorts 1 and 2 of the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF). These sites received funds beginning in the fall of 2006 and spring of 2007 to redesign compensation programs for teachers and principals. The U.S. Department of…

In this article I describe the context within which we developed project e-scape and the early work that laid the foundations of the project. E-scape (e-solutions for creative assessment in portfolio environments) is centred on two innovations. The first concerns a web-based approach to portfolio building; allowing learners to build their…

NCHEMS (National Center for Higher Education Management Systems) has worked with the National Association of Systems heads (NASH)--with support from the Lumina Foundation for Education--to develop (1) empirically-based access regions for postsecondary institutions based on student enrollment patterns and (2) access, transition, and completion…

This article describes the development and implementation of assessment in a new outcome-based marketing curriculum that was developed using a zero-based approach. Outcomes for the marketing curriculum were specified at the program, department, course, and lesson levels. Direct embedded assessments as well as indirect assessment methods were used…

In a FIPSE-funded assessment project, a group of diverse institutions collaborated on developing a common, course-embedded approach to assessing student writing in our first-year writing programs. The results of this assessment project, the processes we developed to assess authentic student writing, and individual institutional perspectives are…

This paper describes the redesign of the goals and objectives of a secondary teacher education program employing authentic assessment. A sophomore level field experience course was identified to run a pilot study of an assessment process that employed video portfolios for evaluation of students' teaching behaviors. The videotapes set the basis…

Direct assessment is a multifaceted assessment paradigm for the diagnosis and planning of remediation for learning difficulties. Its process is experimental in nature and includes testing-the-limits and trial teaching techniques. Its content includes behavior checklists, classroom observation systems for reading and instruction, and informal…

Describes the conceptualization, development, and implementation procedures for a performance-monitoring system, "Changing, Learning, and Growing (CLG)," designed to evaluate the progress of young children with and without disabilities, in an inclusive early childhood education program. Provides an overview and rationale for performance monitoring…