This book presents some of the leading technical, professional, and political challenges associated with the development and implementation of teacher evaluation systems, along with characterizing some of these systems in different countries around the world. The book promotes a broader comprehension of the complexities associated with this kind…

School-based health centers (SBHCs) have been suggested as potential medical homes, yet minimal attention has been paid to measuring their patient-centered medical home (PCMH) implementation. The purposes of this article were to (1) develop an index to measure PCMH attributes in SBHCs, (2) use the SBHC PCMH Index to compare PCMH capacity between…

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF)'s mission is to break the link between family income and educational achievement. This is achieved through summarising the best available evidence in plain language, generating new evidence of 'what works' to improve teaching and learning, and supporting teachers and school leaders to use research evidence…

In this paper the authors examine the uses of teaching performance assessments (TPAs) as resources for learning, program evaluation, and improvement in teacher education. The authors begin by outlining their conceptual framing and related research questions about the uses of TPAs as resources for program evaluation and improvement. They describe…

Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity (SCALE) provides a commentary on the manuscripts in this special issue, responding to criticisms of edTPA as an assessment that narrows the curriculum, heavily relies on students' academic writing skills, and creates additional burdens for teacher candidates. The commentary highlights how edTPA…

This report analyzes the psychometric properties of the revised school-level SEL implementation rubric and the SEL specialists' activity log.

School-based practitioners are often called upon to provide assessment and recommendations for struggling students. These assessments often open doors to specialised services or interventions and provide opportunities for students to build competencies in areas of need. However, these assessments often fail to highlight the abilities of these…

The European inventory on validation of non-formal and informal learning provides an unrivaled source of information detailing how validation of prior learning is developing across Europe. It shows that validation strategies and legislation, despite complexity of the task before them, have been developing slowly but steadily. However, there is…

In 2010, the Institute of Education Sciences commissioned a much-needed national evaluation of response to intervention (RTI). The evaluators defined their task very narrowly, asking "Does the use of universal screening, including a cut-point for designating students for more intensive Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions, increase children's…

The report of the national response to intervention (RTI) evaluation study, conducted during 2011-2012, was released in November 2015. Anyone who has read the lengthy report can attest to its complexity and the design used in the study. Both these factors can influence the interpretation of the results from this evaluation. In this commentary, we…

"Better Evidence, Better Choices, Better Schools," a recent report from the Center for American Progress and the Knowledge Alliance, focuses on the evidence-based research provisions in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). ESSA provisions ask districts and schools to consider various sources of evidence, make judgments about the…

Assessing speaking is one of the most difficult tasks in computer based language testing. Many countries all over the world face the need to implement standardized language tests where speaking tasks are commonly included. However, a number of problems make them rather impractical such as the costs, the personnel involved, the length of time for…

Assessing teaching performance is a contentious issue in current educational policy in many countries. In Chile, a national, standards-based, multi-method, mandatory teacher evaluation system has been in place since 2003 to assess the performance of about 70, 000 public school teachers from pre-school to high school and adult education. The…

Implementation fidelity assessment provides a means of measuring the alignment between the planned program and the implemented program. Unfortunately, the implemented program can differ from the planned program, resulting in ambiguous inferences about the planned program's effectiveness (i.e., it is uncertain if poor results are due to an…

In conducting this review, we examine literature that explores the merits and shortcomings of ELP test design and testing as they have evolved over time through the current era of CCR standards. In the first section, we situate the role of language testing in its broader historical and policy context. In the second section, we examine the evolving…