In 2016, Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) senior leadership determined that students were not consistently engaged with content, instruction, or tasks that support the specific instructional shifts in the North Carolina State Standards and 4Cs (communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity). After an internal review…

Student-centered learning encompasses four overlapping and complementary principles (JFF, 2014): competency-based progression, personalization, flexibility in where and when learning takes place, and facilitation of key skills and dispositions such as agency and ownership. To date, few studies have attempted to quantitatively characterize…

The "College and Career Readiness and Success Organizer" is a graphic that displays a consolidated overview of the many elements that impact a learner's ability to succeed in college and careers at both the institutional and individual levels. The "Organizer" is intended to be a comprehensive and visual representation of the…

This issue brief was written to assist state policymakers in better understanding how social and emotional learning (SEL) can help students to be college and career ready. The brief provides a short description of what SEL is, why it is needed, and what it looks like in practice. In addition, examples of standards that support SEL at the federal…

This study examined differences in the awareness, use, and perceived impact of educators, employers, and workforce training providers toward skills standards implementation in the State of Illinois. Group differences were revealed on the use of skills standards, with educators displaying significantly higher levels of use than employers or…

In U.S. schools, students must pass statewide competency tests to graduate from high school. In this article, the authors summarize the development and testing of a program implemented to improve the skills of students failing to "make the grade" on these high-stakes tests. District personnel randomly assigned twenty-eight students who…

Now in its third year, "Minnesota Measures" provides policymakers and educators with a statewide look at higher education effectiveness in the context of broad state objectives and national and international performance comparisons. Findings are reported across five goals: (1) Improve success of all students, particularly students from…

A survey was conducted of Colorado secondary career and technical programs in 1995 to gauge how the state has responded to mandates of the Carl Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Act of 1990. Results were reported for the first three of nine standards developed by a statewide committee in 1992. The three standards require secondary programs…

For most of Minnesota's 150 years of statehood, its distinctive economic advantages were largely a function of its natural resources, such as timber, taconite and tourism. Today, while these and other resources remain cornerstones of the state economy, it is clear that the intellectual capacity of Minnesota's people is emerging as a promising…

When the North Dakota State Department of Education mandated new guidelines for accreditation, each school district in the state was required to develop and implement student performance standards and measurements for every curricular area. This paper describes one district's approach to developing a performance assessment program. Teacher…

A survey was conducted of Colorado postsecondary career and technical programs in 1995 to gauge how the state has responded to mandates of the Carl Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Act of 1990. Results were reported for the first three of nine standards developed by a statewide committee in 1992. The three standards require postsecondary…

In 2005, Governor Tim Pawlenty and the Minnesota Legislature charged the Minnesota Office of Higher Education with developing an accountability system to measure the higher education sector's effectiveness in meeting state goals. Minnesota's leaders recognized that the knowledge, creativity and intellectual capacity of the state's people are the…

Recounts the experiences of Kansas social studies educators in designing and implementing a workable assessment instrument that would meet state requirements. The design emphasized five characteristics (thematic orientation, skills emphasis, social studies perspectives, variety of resources, and community orientation) constructed around a…