This study examined the validity and reliability of a newly developed instrument for performance assessment of teachers. The instrument was based on the "framework for teaching" proposed by C. Danielson, a framework that identifies the aspects of a teacher's responsibilities that have been documented through empirical studies and theoretical…

This book covers the principles of risk and risk management and offers a framework for analyzing the significant, often unforeseen threats facing higher education institutions today. It examines the critical elements of a disaster preparedness plan and addresses business continuity and mission continuity planning. The book also provides tools for…

The sporadic investigations regarding children's concepts of death have lacked standard methods or instruments for evaluating these conceptions. Whether or not research on children's concepts of death can be gauged by a standard set of questions is explored in this paper. It reports on the evaluation of a new questionnaire's (Concept of Life and…

While it is imperative that attempts be made to assess the predictive accuracy of any prediction model, traditional measures of predictive accuracy have been criticized as suffering from "the base rate problem." The base rate refers to the relative frequency of occurrence of the event being studied in the population of interest, and the…

This guide shows how to integrate assessment with teaching and learning to reach educational goals. The aim is to present assessment concepts in a concise manner that can be understood and applied by teachers, administrators, and other school personnel. The chapters, organized around major assessment topics, are: (1) "Integrating Assessment with…

This report summarizes efforts by the state of New York to ensure the accuracy and integrity of data reported by school districts. The Office of the State Comptroller (OSC) has taken the lead in reviewing these data, focusing on the uses of attendance and enrollment data and making recommendations for improvement in state systems and local…

To ensure fairness, it is of critical importance that testing programs make sure that essay items given to examinees are equivalent in difficulty. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the stability and accuracy of a logistic regression based polytomous essay difficulty index. Preliminary results from a simulation study (9 conditions with a…

This paper and its "Executive Summary," separately published, are intended primarily for Chief State School Officers and their immediate staff members involved in statewide accountability policy development and implementation. The paper addresses certain key issues and contains a full exploration of the related technical aspects of…

A series of studies was conducted to develop and validate a scale to study racism in its newly adapted, ambivalent form. The scale was designed to measure the separate positively correlated hostile and benevolent components of racism. The first two studies, which involved 39 and 73 college students, established the questions that could be used for…

This study evaluated the comparative stability and agreement of three approaches to calculating school effects given both student-level and school-level data. The approaches were hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), ordinary least squares (OLS), and weighted least squares (WLS). Analyses were conducted using data from the 1998 Maryland School…

The importance of reassessing the psychometric properties of an existing scale is highlighted. The construct validity of a driver attitude scale was not confirmed by factor analysis and the original scale scores were shown to have poor to moderate internal reliability. On the basis of a re-analysis of data from 1,059 repeat traffic offenders, 39…

This paper reviewed several studies supporting the idea that empathy is an important aspect of interpersonal behavior and moral conduct and providing further evidence for the validity of an empathy scale. Minres factor analyses were performed to determine the underlying structure of the empathy scale and its relationship to the California…

The central purpose of this study was to determine the effect of training of teachers in the use of elements and sequences of strategies for content development through classroom communication behaviors. (Author/RK)

Discusses the three vital factors upon which information derived from an evaluation instrument depends: (1) the criteria by which teaching performance is judged, (2) the reliability and validity of the acquired data, and (3) the comparison of the evidence against the criteria. (Author/EA)