Increasingly, colleges and universities are being compared and evaluated based on the outcomes that their students experience. While both self-evaluation and accountability are valuable, one should be careful that the right outcomes are measured. Using data from 21 community colleges, we find that traditional measures often ignore key positive…

Universities have responded to the expansion of higher education and restructuring of the labour market by redesigning curriculum to better emphasise transferable skills and embed pedagogies that contribute to graduate employability. However, the ways in which universities judge and share achievement still provides poor evidence of what students…

State-issued seals and certificates of biliteracy are increasingly common nationwide. Nevertheless, limited research to date has examined how this state legislation functions as language in education policy and the ideological foundations of these policies. Addressing this gap, the present paper examines state seals as an instance of neoliberal…

Efforts to promote professionalism in evaluation, whether through certification, credentialing, or other path, are not new, but there is a new push to adopt sets of essential evaluator competencies, both in the United States and globally, that are intended to advance professionalism of the field. This emphasis on professionalism is relevant to the…

Previous research from the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL) and the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) found that prior learning assessment/credit for prior learning (PLA/CPL) 1 has a positive effect on adult student credential completion--an effect that was evident for every student subgroup analyzed in a…

The January 2015 American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) "60 Second Survey" asked respondents to indicate their institutions' international student recruiting practices. As with other 60 Second Surveys, the survey was distributed through the FluidSurveys platform to all AACRAO members. After…

This essay explores the tensions between internal and external quality assurance processes, making a case for the preeminence of internal actions to ensure the capacity of institutions to respond quickly and effectively to the rapidly evolving global conditions affecting all of higher education. As the forms and means of formal and informal…

This report presents the "Annual Report Card on California Teacher Preparation Programs for the Academic Year 2014-2015" as required by Title II of the Higher Education Act. In 2008, the law was reauthorized and changes were made to the Title II data collection and reporting requirements. The 2008-09 reporting year was the pilot year in…

Recent developments in OER and MOOCs (Open Educational Resources and Massive Open Online Courses) have raised questions as to how learners engaging with these courses and components might be assessed or credentialed. This descriptive and exploratory paper examines PLAR (Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition) as a possible answer to these…

This paper is part of a series investigating the implementation of competency education. The purpose of the paper is to explore how districts and schools can redesign grading systems to best help students to excel in academics and to gain the skills that are needed to be successful in college, the community, and the workplace. In order to make the…

This article introduces the second issue of the special double issue focusing on forensic, cultural, and systems issues in child sexual abuse cases. We briefly review the articles, which include a discussion of child sexual abuse myths, an empirical analysis of extended child sexual abuse evaluations, an article on the role of the medical provider…

Annual student testing may make it possible to measure the contributions to student achievement made by individual teachers. But would these "teacher value-added" measures help to improve student achievement? I consider the statistical validity, purposes, and costs of teacher value-added policies. Many of the key assumptions of teacher value added…

This review focuses on what the author terms a reconsideration of the working credentials of the randomly controlled trial (RCT) design, and includes a discussion of popularly accepted aspects as well as some new perspectives. The author concludes that there is nothing either Imperative or superior about the need for RCT designs, and that an…

In this age of heightened accountability, academia is increasingly being asked to link assessment to candidate performance outcomes in multiple ways. Research demonstrates the importance of aligning assessment with content standards but cautions that it is critical that assessments match the content, cover a wide range of knowledge, are…

Conclusions about levels and trends in high school dropout differ dramatically depending on whether dropout is measured using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) or from the Common Core of Data (CCD). Using CPS- and CCD-based drop-out measures for 16- to 19-year-olds--which differ solely in their estimates of the number of 16- to…