The Government is committed to introducing a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) to assess the quality of teaching and learning in higher education. Designing the right solution is challenging. There is no off-the-shelf solution from other countries that we can lift. But we can learn lessons from other sectors. This pamphlet explores rating…

The United States of America has failed to educate generations of children. This egregious failure consigns far too many young people--especially those from low-income families or who are African American and Latino--to lives on the margins of the American mainstream. As a result, unemployment, underemployment, imprisonment, child poverty, and…

This case study examines the implementation of "Foreign Language Activities" (English language education), which officially began in Japanese elementary schools in 2011. Subjects in this study included 37 Japanese classroom teachers (20 males and 17 females) in four elementary schools in Tokyo. The Teacher Foreign Language Anxiety Scale…

Coaching and other on-site, individualized professional development strategies (consultation, mentoring, and technical assistance) have emerged as promising strategies to support the application of new teaching strategies and overall quality improvement among practitioners in early care and education settings. The purpose of this report is to…

The International Civil Aviation Association has developed a set of Language Proficiency Requirements (LPRs) and a Language Proficiency Rating Scale, which seeks to define proficiency in the language needed for aviation purposes at six different levels. Pilots, air traffic controllers and aeronautical station operators are required to achieve at…

Accountability in education has been expanding for the past twenty years. As standards for curricular areas continued to develop, educational shareholders desired a way to measure student achievement contextualized by the established standards. Since 1964, policies expanded federal involvement with education, and with the No Child Left Behind Act…

In 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Early Learning Initiative (ELI) to improve the school readiness of Washington State's children through three main strategies: (1) development of high-quality, community-wide early learning initiatives in two communities; (2) enhancement of statewide systems that support early…

This paper provides a list of variables identified as important to learning that emerged from a "meta-review" of the professional literature, as well as a summary of consensus ratings of these variables by professionals in the field. The variables are organized into six major categories: (1) state and district variables; (2) out of school…

This study investigated the status of instruction in cultures and languages other than English in Queensland, Australia in preparation for development of comprehensive and coherent public policies for the field. The report addresses the following topics: the policy development process (project background and the nature of language education…