What David J. Ferrero has called "the Hundred Year's War between "progressives" and "traditionalists"" continues unabated in the twenty-first century. Undoubtedly, current initiatives in public education favor those who support traditional approaches, yet many critics believe inflexible state tests are restricting…

In spring 2009, the Center on Education Policy (CEP) continued its research on the impact of test-based federal and state accountability policies by conducting case studies of six high schools in six different districts within Washington State. The purpose was to learn more about the curricular and instructional changes that administrators and…

Effective testing appears to be that which is congruent with the mode of instruction. Reading test items aloud does not seem to compensate for poor reading ability of children tested. (Author)

Discusses the potential of a test to instruct students and thus facilitate their learning. The author shows various ways of giving a carefully prepared test on a second occasion. (RM)

The impact of aptitude differences on learning performance is assessed. As a result of the assessment, instructional strategies are being developed to make efficient training programs for men of differing aptitude levels. Observations were that the high level group did better when left without a structured training program. The middle range was…

This document includes the final data collection and scoring tools created by the "Scoop" project, a five-year project funded through the Center for Evaluation, Standards,and Student Testing (CRESST), to develop an alternative approach for characterizing classroom practice. The goal of the project was to use artifacts and related materials to…

Conventional testing systems usually give students a score as their test result, but do not show them how to improve their learning performance. Researchers have indicated that students would benefit more if individual learning guidance could be provided. However, most of the existing learning diagnosis models ignore the fact that one concept…

Previous research has shown that compared with their American counterparts, Chinese students' artwork is perceived as less creative by both Chinese and American judges. Three different factors are posited to be responsible for the discrepancy in rated creativity between Chinese and American students, namely, social values, school pedagogic…

In an educational context, local, ecologically valid tests can reflect the use of literacy and thinking tools. These tests present a challenge to central, content-focused, high-stakes testing, and to transmission approaches to teaching. They require teachers to accept knowledge as a verb, and to design assessment protocols that reflect…

This work compares the results of three assessment systems used in two Spanish universities (the "Universidad Politecnica de Madrid" and the "Universidad Catolica de Avila"): the traditional system based on final examinations, continuous assessment with periodic tests and a proposed system (specially designed for heterogeneous…

This article narrates and interrogates some of the responses of a group of English teachers, and their lecturer, to an assignment in a post-graduate course entitled Language and assessment. The assignment required the teachers to respond to a text in a mode other than writing, and to design the assessment of this representation. Three of their…

Students in an introductory psychology course took a quiz a week over each textbook chapter, followed by a cumulative final exam. Students missing a quiz in class could make up a quiz at any time during the semester, and answers to quiz items were available to students prior to the cumulative final exam. The cumulative final exam consisted of half…

AT THE INDIANA UNIVERSITY REGIONAL CAMPUS AT FORT WAYNE, 171 FRESHMAN STUDIED A UNIT ON "STIMULUS AND RESPONSE" IN A MODIFIED FORM OF THE PROGRAMING STYLE CALLED "CONVERSATIONAL CHAINING," IN WHICH THE ONLY RESPONSE CONFIRMATION IS PROVIDED WITHIN THE NEXT FRAME IN THE PROGRAM. THERE WAS NO SPECIFIC EMPHASIS SUCH AS CAPITALIZATION, BUT ALWAYS AN…

This collection of essays focuses on educational testing, showing how testing encroaches on teacher freedom and how narrow standards can actually reduce student achievement. The chapters are: (1) Testing Is Not Teaching; (2) The Freedom Factor; (3) Sharing Power with Intelligent Expectation; (4) Everyone Has a Story To Tell; (5) Lets Change the…

In many school districts, the pressure to raise test scores has created overnight celebrity status for formative assessment. Its powers to raise student achievement have been touted, however, without attending to the research on which these claims were based. Sociocultural learning theory provides theoretical grounding for understanding how…