National goals and performance standards were introduced in Sweden during the 1990s as part of a curriculum reform. The intention was to detect shortcomings among students and provide support to those students who did not reach the passing grade in one (or several) subject/s. Despite this reform, approximately one-fourth of the students do not…

This paper aims to compare various Performance Management Systems (PMS) for business school in order to find the strengths of each standard as inputs to design new model of PMS. There are many critical aspects and gaps notified for new model to improve performance and even recognized that self evaluation performance management is not well…

This document summarizes a study that examines the relationship between performance on Utah's English proficiency assessment and English language arts and mathematics content assessments by English language learner students and compares the performance of English language learner and non-English language learner students on the content…

This study examines the relationship between performance on Utah's English proficiency assessment and English language arts and mathematics content assessments by English language learner students and compares the performance of English language learner and non-English language learner students on the content assessments. Two research questions…

This article reports on the implementation of the Integrated Performance Assessment (IPA) in an Early Foreign Language Learning program. The goal of this research was to examine the performance of grade 4 and 5 students of Spanish on the IPA. Performance across the three communicative tasks is described and modifications to IPA procedures based on…

Much of the argument about comparability of examination standards is at cross-purposes; contradictory positions are in fact often both defensible, but they are using the same words to mean different things. To clarify this, two broad conceptualisations of standards can be identified. One sees the standard in the observed phenomena of performance…

To measure retention of oral reading fluency, three students attending a learning support classroom used a repeating reading strategy with two passages. Each student read one passage to a high performance standard and the other passage to a lower performance standard. Results show it took the students more practice to reach the higher performance…

Robert Coe has claimed that three broad conceptions of comparability can be identified from the literature: performance, statistical and conventional. Each of these he rejected, in favour of a single, integrated conception which relies upon the notion of a "linking construct" and which he termed "construct comparability".…

The purpose of this study was to investigate teacher practices of enabling factors in the implementation of technology-assisted PBL, in Tatweer schools in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. This study also explored how the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) National Education Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS.T) were used in Tatweer…

Recently, there has been a significant expansion in the use of performance assessment in large scale testing programs. Although there has been significant support from curriculum and policy stakeholders, the technical feasibility of large scale performance assessments has remained a question. This report is intended to contribute to the debate by…

This paper discusses the implications for educational reform in the United States of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) comparative study of performance standards. To provide some context for the reader, the paper briefly reprises major shifts in the intellectual underpinnings of U.S. educational reform and reports on…

A new national assessment system could lay a solid foundation for improving schools by monitoring the effectiveness of schools and teachers and student progress toward national goals. A sound national assessment system would: (1) allow valid comparisons between schools, districts, and states; (2) provide sound data on achievement, not just…

This article provides a framework for the rest of the articles in this special issue comparing the utility of three standard-setting methods with complex performance assessments. The context of the standard setting study is described, and the methods are outlined. (SLD)

This article explores issues involved in using assessments as a means of defining standards and encouraging efforts to meet them. It compares the European examination system with the present American testing system. It also considers issues that must be faced in defining learning domains in ways that do not encourage narrowly focused training on…

Curriculum transformation was examined at seven higher education institutions in the USA that were developing "performance-based" teacher-education programmes. A heuristic was created to differentiate the contemporary performance standards-based assessment movement from its historical predecessor, competency- or performance-based teacher…