Beginning with the No Child Left Behind federal legislation, states were required to use data to monitor and improve student achievement. For high schools, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education chose End of Course Exams (EOC) to demonstrate levels of student achievement. The policy changed from school choice of paper-pencil…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine relationship between teacher competences and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) with empowerment as a mediating factor. Design/methodology/approach: The study took a cross-sectional descriptive and analytical design. Using cluster and random sampling procedures, data were obtained from 383…

The article argues that science assessment should change from an item-driven to a construct-driven practice and pay more attention to disciplinary scientific reasoning. It investigates assessment scales developed from a novel theoretical rationale, describing scientific reasoning as three fundamental practices (hypothesizing, experimenting, and…

This report looks at the progress of the 2017 ACT®-tested graduating class relative to college and career readiness. This year's report shows that 60% of students in the 2017 US graduating class took the ACT test, up from 54% in 2013. The increased number of test takers over the past several years enhances the breadth and depth of the data pool,…

The purpose of this study was to examine learning strategies accounted for mathematics achievement across Turkey and neighboring countries. Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Azerbaijan, Russian Federation, Israel, Serbia, Romania and Jordan were involved in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA 2009) study. Since other neighbors of Turkey…

The 21st-century work environment places strong emphasis on nonroutine transversal skills. In an educational context, complex problem solving (CPS) is generally considered an important transversal skill that includes knowledge acquisition and its application in new and interactive situations. The dynamic and interactive nature of CPS requires a…

The 2014 Michigan Public High School Context and Performance Report Card is the Mackinac Center's second effort to measure high school performance. The first high school assessment was published in 2012, followed by the Center's 2013 elementary and middle school report card, which used a similar methodology to evaluate school performance. The…

The Michigan Context and Performance Report Card measures school performance by adjusting standardized test scores to account for student background. Comparing schools using unadjusted test scores ignores the significant relationship between academic performance and student socioeconomic background--a dynamic outside a school's control. The…

The importance of higher education has never been clearer. Educational attainment--the number of years a person spends in school--strongly predicts adult earnings, as well as health and civic engagement. Yet relative to other developed nations, educational attainment in the United States is lagging, with young Americans who heretofore led the…

This paper provides evidence on the sources of differences in inequality in educational scores and their evolution over time in four European countries. Using Programme for International Student Assessment data from the 2000 and the 2006 waves, the paper shows that inequality decreased in Germany and Spain (two "decentralised" schooling…

Findings from this study show that educational and mobility opportunities for families and students participating in the Chilean voucher system are not homogenously distributed. Some families and students use and benefit from the system, while others will remain marginalized. The quantitative results in this study demonstrate that students of…

Using the nationally representative, cohort-based data of the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:02), this study employs multiple regression to examine the effects of exit exams on student achievement and school completion. This study finds that exit exams as a whole do not have substantial effects on student achievement in mathematics,…

Assessing a high school's effectiveness is not straightforward. Comparing a school's standardized test scores to those of other schools is one approach to measuring effectiveness, but a major objection to this method is that students' test scores tend to be related to students' "socioeconomic" status--family household income, for…

Under No Child Left Behind, urban school districts have increasingly turned to interim assessments, administered at regular intervals, to help gauge student progress in advance of annual state exams. These assessments have spawned growing debate among educators, assessment experts, and the testing industry: are they worth the significant…

A case study was conducted in 2006-07 to explore how one US campus implemented a centralised e-assessment system. The study specifically measured the extent of adoption by faculty members, identified their reasons for adoption and evaluated the impact on teaching and learning. The purposes of the system, entitled researching learning (REAL, a…