This article argues that the national trend to replace developmental writing programs with mainstreaming and corequisite courses presents an important opportunity to reconsider writing goals and assessment practices for all students. This insight emerges in part from data collected over several semesters at one community college, which showed that…

The adoption and integration of ePortfolios into third level teaching and learning provide many benefits as well as challenges. In this article, we capture the perspectives of nine academics from across seven departments within a small Higher Education Institute (HEI) who integrated ePortfolios into their teaching. Through a series of…

Why do good ideas created and promulgated by bright, dedicated people have no significant, lasting effects on teaching? The answer: reformers meddle in trained teachers' everyday practice--educating students. Few professions take kindly to laypersons forcing reforms in their practices. Any school-restructuring initiative must include teachers in…

During the 2000-2001 school year, the Washington State Institute for Public Policy conducted a study of how public high schools in Washington State are responding to state education reform. One aspect of the study was the experiences of high schools with various strategies to increase student engagement in learning. This paper summarizes study…

This article outlines the experiences of a first-year writing program's adoption of large-scale portfolio assessment as part of its move from student-focused assessment to programmatic assessment. This research is an attempt to provide evidence to support the claims benefits associated with portfolio assessment and to chronicle the changes that…

A study was conducted to determine how the Career Preparation Assessment portfolio (CPA), tailored to be used in local school reform efforts, was implemented in 10 schools in 1998-99. The research was organized and reported using these four clusters of research questions: tailoring the CPA, implementation, student performance and assessment, and…

The biggest barrier to fully implementing a program like the Big Six has been traditional attitudes toward student assessment. This article defines assessment terminology and provides an annotated bibliography of World Wide Web resources for alternative assessment, authentic assessment and portfolios, rubrics, specific course content and ages and…

This is the second part of a two-part article on the diffusion of electronic portfolios in preservice teacher education. The first part addressed issues of adoption and implementation; this part documents "next steps" and key recommendations by informants from the six programs studied. Next steps included streamlining requirements, addressing…

School researchers and administrators are developing new ways to measure student skills and progress, using portfolios, self-evaluation, verbal answers to mathematics problems, and other assessment formats. This book explains the assessment reform movement and describes programs across the country that have embraced new forms of assessment.…

This paper places Kentucky's accountability program in the national context, and then describes how educators in four rural Kentucky school districts reacted to the program in the initial years of its implementation. The information is drawn from a qualitative study of the implementation of the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) in these four…