An informal guide to the self-evaluation of school and college foreign language programs is presented. Its purpose is to suggest guidelines to departments that have not yet developed their own full evaluative procedures. Questions relate to: (1) philosophy and goals; (2) curriculum, methods, materials, and facilities; (3) faculty training and…

This document presents guidelines and resource materials to assist individuals in planning career academies. Chapter 1 defines career academies as programs designed around the following key elements: (1) development and cultivation of a small learning community; (2) a college preparatory curriculum with a career theme; and (3) partnerships with…

This document is intended to help business leaders to optimize school-to-career partnerships. The guide begins with a series of facts documenting the benefits of school-to-career partnerships and a brief introduction. The first section traces business involvement in education over the past 2 decades and explains how data analysis and a focus on…

"Theory as Method: Small Theories of Treatments," by Mark W. Lipsey, is one of the most influential and highly cited articles to appear in "New Directions for Evaluation." It articulated an approach in which methods for studying causation depend, in large part, on what is known about the theory underlying the program. Lipsey discussed the benefits…

Including youth in the evaluation process can enhance the quality of the inquiry and be empowering for the participants, but it is not without challenges. In this article, several principles for youth-involved research and evaluation are outlined. These come from those who are pioneering this approach and from current research on the dilemmas of…

This article addresses considerations for assessment and intervention planning in serving twice-exceptional preschool children. The authors propose blending recommended assessment practices in early childhood gifted education and early childhood special education in a comprehensive assessment process. In doing so, unique needs of twice-exceptional…

The use of evaluation to examine and improve the quality of teaching and courses is now a component of most universities. However, despite the various methods and opportunities for evaluation, a lack of understanding of the processes, measures and value are some of the major impediments to effective evaluation. Evaluation requires an understanding…

Increased focus on assessment of student learning, within college classrooms, has lead many professors to routinely employ classroom assessment techniques as a means to make adjustments in teaching during the instructional process. This article describes a technique, Talking Drawings, which was developed by a high school teacher as a teaching…

While there are lots of books with information on why and how to differentiate instruction, here at last is a book that gets to the heart of why some efforts to differentiate flop while others lead to sweeping, positive results. When it's your job to support differentiated instruction in a single school or systemwide, you need the guidance from…

The authors assign semester- or quarter-long team-based projects in several Computer Science and Finance courses. This paper reports on our experience in designing, managing, and evaluating such projects. In particular, we discuss the effects of team size and of various peer evaluation schemes on team performance and student learning. We report…

This study investigates how peer assessment can help students to learn about photosynthesis in a "high attaining," year nine class in a UK 11-18 comprehensive school. There is limited research on how peer assessment can influence the learning of "high attaining students"; most existing research focuses on how formative…

For the African Virtual University and its consortium of African universities the implementation of quality promoting initiatives are not without challenges and scepticisms. To be discussed in this article is the case of a teacher education qualification in ten different African countries. Seven countries were sampled and visited in 2006 with the…

Cluster randomized trials (CRTs) have been widely used in field experiments treating a cluster of individuals as the unit of randomization. This study focused particularly on situations where CRTs are accompanied by a common complication, namely, treatment noncompliance or, more generally, intervention nonadherence. In CRTs, compliance may be…

Peer review is an umbrella term that refers to a class of selection and oversight practices, including the familiar mechanisms of the review of proposals submitted for funding, of manuscripts for scholarly publications, and of personnel qualifications and portfolios for selection and promotion. Peer review has long been a cornerstone of modern…

Purpose: This paper seeks to concentrate on bottom-up approaches in order to promote a European vocational education and training (VET) concept. The overall aim of this article is to demonstrate that sophisticated approaches still have a chance of becoming common practice in European countries. Design/methodology/approach: The centre of the…