Students' affective status, provides an indication of the ways students are likely to act in the future. That is, students' current affective status foreshadows the ways children will act as "grown-ups" long after school is behind them. Clearly, educators should be concerned with the long-term impact of their instructional programs, so…

"U.S. students are being educated less well these days than they should be," writes W. James Popham. One key contributing factor is that educators often use the wrong tests to make their most important educational decisions. Two recent events have made it a perfect time to change the way we conduct our educational testing: growing…

The tests we use to evaluate student achievement may well be sound measures of what students know, but they are faulty indicators at best of how well they have been taught. A remedy to this this situation of judging teachers by the performance of their students on high-stakes tests may be in hand already. We should look to the methods successfully…

In recent years, increasing numbers of professional development programs have dealt with assessment literacy for teachers and/or administrators. Is assessment literacy merely a fashionable focus for today's professional developers or, in contrast, should it be regarded as a significant area of professional development interest for many years to…

Against a shifting set of assessment preferences in the US regarding whether educational assessment should continue to be a states rights game or become a federally dominated undertaking, the publication of five first-rate analyses about England's national curriculum assessment (NCA) is particularly propitious. Taken together, these five papers…

Contends that educational reform strategies that feature measurement-driven instruction as their centerpiece are often maligned as "quick fixes." Although asserting that measurement-driven instruction has potential benefits, notes that assessment experts should share their knowledge with policymakers to avoid ineffective strategies. (Author/NB)

This document, noting that teacher evaluation has now become a terror for teachers due to legislation such as the Stull Act, reviews the major assessment alternatives for teacher competence appraisal. The author discusses the use and merits of ratings, observations, and pupil test performance and finds them all to have fatal defects. He then…

There is considerable controversy over high stakes tests and teachers' competencies in high stakes testing. Presents a pseudo self-test for teachers to determine how muddle-free their own test-talk really is. This tongue-in-cheek test includes 17 items with assessment-related words or phrases and a choice of definitions from which teachers may…

This study investigates the improvement in research and development skills which resulted from the 1968 AERA Presession. Instructional materials were administered to 47 participants who were pretested and posttested to assess their improvement. The results of the presession are considered favorable. (HW)

The importance of educational accountability and assessment literacy is recognized as a long-term challenge to the educational system. The complexities in becoming an assessment literate and provide an opportunity to the educators to display their effective learning is discussed.

This program is designed to train individuals to develop and evaluate educational products by means of a consortium composed of agencies and individuals in Southern California with expertise in one or more aspect of product development and product evaluation. The trainees would include degree and non-degree candidates, and the program would…

Assessment for learning involves the frequent, continual use of both formal and informal classroom assessments. It can be as simple as requiring students to respond to a lesson-embedded, one-item quiz as a way of gauging student understanding of what is being taught. Ideally, this innovative approach to classroom assessment is based on a careful…

This booklet is designed to assist those responsible for conducting educational evaluations. The work contains a collection of recently developed technical procedures relevant to educational evaluation and to describe them in a straightforward manner. The guidelines are organized into three sections: 1) Objectives; 2) Measurement; and 3) Data…

For the last four decades, students' scores on standardized tests have increasingly been regarded as the most meaningful evidence for evaluating U.S. schools. Most Americans, indeed, believe students' standardized test performances are the only legitimate indicator of a school's instructional effectiveness. Yet, although test-based evaluations of…