Transform your school's grading practices with this updated second edition on evidence-based grading. The book provides a five-phase process for moving beyond standards-based and competency-based grading models. Administrators and teachers will gain understanding of the core principles of evidence-based assessment, refocus assessments on…

University rankings have a growing impact on how people view the academic excellence of higher education. The complicated relationship between rankings and academic excellence is explored in this essay along with how it may affect higher education policy and practice. The importance of rankings and their influence on institutional decision-making…

Before developing a school- and community-wide work plan around preventing bullying and harassment, school administrators should employ data collection tools to determine their specific areas of focus. Successful bullying prevention efforts must be driven by local data and rooted in research on effective practices. These policies must undergo…

Factor analysis is a versatile class of psychometric techniques used by researchers to provide insight into the psychological dimensions (factors) that may account for the relationships among variables in a given dataset. The primary goal of a factor analysis is to determine a more parsimonious set of variables (i.e., fewer than the number of…

Making causal claims is central to evaluation practice because we want to know the effects of a program, project, or policy. In the past decade, the conversation about establishing causal claims has become prominent (and problematic). In response to this changing conversation about causality, we argue that evaluators need to take up some new ways…

The authors of this article each bring a different theoretical background to their evaluation practice. The first author has a background of attention to culturally responsive evaluation (CRE), while the second author has a background of attention to systems theories and their application to evaluation. Both have had their own evolution of…

Schools have limited experience and little guidance to identify and install evidence-based and promising programs and practices/interventions (EBPs) within advanced tiers of School-Wide Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (SWPBIS). One form of guidance is the Hexagon Tool which can be used to ensure a match between the EBP and student…

This paper explores the process of assessment in social work education programs throughout the United States. Following the guidelines of the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) 2008 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS), social work education has switched from student learning outcomes to competency-based measures. Included in…

This guide is designed to help teachers and administrators use data to continuously improve equity in schools. Educators can also use data to engage students, parents/guardians, the community, and others who want to make positive changes in schools to increase equity. The purposes of the guide are to: (1) Introduce MAEC's Equity Audit Tools as a…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to focus on challenges faced by longitudinal quantitative analyses of school improvement processes and offers a systematic literature review of current papers that use longitudinal analyses. In this context, the authors assessed designs and methods that are used to analyze the relation between school…

A proposal is presented to assess teacher's performance based on the aspects that educational research has found as fundamental to achieve students' learning. The proposal is aimed mainly at teachers and people responsible for teacher's assessment programs. After criticizing the traditional way of assessing teacher's performance, it is shown a…

Background: A project has recently been proposed by the National Education Examinations Authority, P. R. China, to develop a national framework of reference for English language education, provisionally called China Standards of English (CSE). In this article, we argue for the necessity of developing the framework of reference in China and…

Assessment guidelines in the "Australian Curriculum: Science" are outlined after the status and practice of science is overviewed. Available, but dated, empirical reports of teachers' assessment processes and procedures across the interface are compared. Current assessment practices are inferred from indirect research data. Two…

This report summarizes and further develops ideas discussed at a national working session held on May 23, 2014, to examine issues and options associated with initially classifying English learners (ELs). It is the third in a series of guidance papers intended to support states in large-scale assessment consortia that are expected to move toward a…

This study is an analysis of the depth of reflection exhibited in written documents produced by English teacher candidates. Description and insights were drawn into the reflective thinking of the undergraduate teacher candidates in the context of teacher research essays that they produced. Reflection is widely viewed as enabling teacher candidates…