The Advanced Placement® Human Geography (AP HG) course has shown tremendous growth since 2001, the first year students took the end-of-course exam. Slightly more than 3,000 students took the exam that year; the number exceeded 163,000 in 2015 (Lanegran and Zeigler 2016) and is expected to grow further still. The College Board describes the course…

While many policymakers see college credit attainment programs as potential cost savings, little research has examined the actual savings (if any) tied to taking college classes in high school. This Rapid Response brief helps fill the gap, investigating and comparing the costs of providing college credit in high school in three states with the…

As co-authors of this response to Annmarie Guzy's essay, these authors provide different vantage points on prior-credit programs that arise from their distinct roles on campus, and together they suggest the appropriate way forward for honors. To represent their unique perspectives and to mimic the ongoing back-and-forth on this topic on their…

Schools that teach within the context of the International Baccalaureate® (IB) Middle Years Program approach learning through a global lens. They focus on how subjects relate to a larger, international context and connect topics together so that students can have a deeper understanding of knowledge. To further support and promote this approach to…

Evidence-centered design (ECD) is an orientation towards assessment development. It differs from conventional practice in several ways and consists of multiple activities. Each of these activities results in a set of useful documentation: domain analysis, domain modeling, construction of the assessment framework, and assessment…

The foregoing articles constitute what I consider a comprehensive and clear description of the redesign process of a major assessment. The articles serve to illustrate the problems that will need to be addressed by large-scale assessments in the twenty-first century. Primary among them is how to organize the development of such assessments to meet…

In December of 2009, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels announced that the latest state revenue forecasts predict that the state of Indiana will spend $1.8 billion more than it receives in tax revenue collections through July 2011. Therefore, Governor Daniels announced that he will cut at least $300 million from K-12 education spending in the next…

Queensland Academy for Health Sciences (QAHS) is a senior secondary high school offering the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme (DP). As part of the Diploma, students are required to complete a referenced research essay of four thousand words. For most, this will be their first experience of such a challenging undertaking.…

This paper analyzes the influence of three different learning paradigms for learning literacy--formalist, cognitive-processing, and literacy practices--on the implementation of the Common Core State Standards. It argues that the Common Core State Standards are based largely on a formalist paradigm as evident in the emphasis on teaching text…