To study the adequacy of the brief oral examination format as a basis for assessing oral skills, the study compared samples of 15-minute oral exams with 3-hour written exam results by the same students. The resultant average size of oral samples was about 77% of that of written samples, with good comparability, leading to useful conclusions about…

Offers suggestions for teaching about the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus' voyages to the Americas. Includes details on teaching definitions about the topic, offering an essay test, and providing a nine-day unit of study on Columbus. Provides a three-item annotated bibliography of works about the explorer. (SG)

School boards should focus on knowledge, skills, and attitudes students need to function in tomorrow's world, instead of determining what education programs the community wants and can afford. Results-oriented evaluation is a house of sand, because students come from varied backgrounds and most results are caused by the system originating them.…

A widespread perception about falling standards prompted Margaret Thatcher's government to pass 1988 legislation mandating a national curriculum and accompanying testing system. The worst-case scenario feared by many British teachers is coming to pass: a test-driven curriculum without significant attention to teachers' assessments of student…

The computer can be incorporated into educational assessment at two levels: clerical work such as scoring, converting scores, administering test items, and organizing data into manageable profiles; and expanding horizons and deepening the understanding of what is important to measure and how best to measure it through expert systems and new…

Presents research on individuals' ability to perform Piaget's water-level task. At almost every age and for each sex, some subjects had high probability of success and some had low. Age-related improvement was not a result of children's increasing accuracy in task performance. Differences in performance between sexes were evident at all ages.…

Explores the implications for student behavior of different standards. Shows that competition between students does stimulate academic effort provided students are appropriately rewarded for achieving and argues that stratifying students into groups in which each has a chance for success may be preferred to the setting of a single national…

Investigated whether there were differences in retention of language when both visual and auditory stimuli were employed as opposed to just a visual stimulus. It was found that reading-only resulted in higher scores on tests taken immediately, whereas combined listening and reading resulted in higher tests when tests were delayed. (12 references)…

Regular classroom teachers and special education teachers (total n=130) were surveyed to determine their attitudes toward assessment reports written by other professionals. Results indicated lack of enthusiasm, hostility, and resignation to the assessments' perceived irrelevance and uselessness. (Author/JDD)

Discussion of standards for school library media programs focuses on standards developed for Alabama's school systems. A study that was conducted to determine the level of implementation of the criteria for library media programs is described, hypotheses tested are explained, and the questionnaire used in the study is included. (nine references)…

Reviews 14 selected conferences and 11 key reports and documents regarding professional preparation and the development of professional standards in health education, starting with a 1943 statement from the American Public Health Association. The review was developed from an analysis of original documents containing conference proceedings and…

This article examines special problems in assessing young blind children resulting from their great heterogeneity. Case studies are offered to illustrate the irresponsibility of applying standardized tests developed for sighted populations to blind children who have very different experiential backgrounds. Positive principles for assessment of the…

This study was designed to determine whether differences in performance on a popular instructional gaming package would be observed under differing conditions of color presentation. It was hypothesized that performance would be enhanced under a monochromatic and/or moderately colored condition, and least successful under a multicolored condition.…

A recent study compared hands-on scientific inquiry assessment to assessments involving lab notebooks, computer simulations, short-answer paper-and-pencil problems, and multiple-choice questions. Creating high quality performance assessments is a costly, time-consuming process requiring considerable scientific and technological know-how. Improved…

This article describes addition of a "learn a routine" procedure to functional visual assessments of children with severe neurological and physical disabilities. The procedure capitalizes on the child's interest of the moment and provides information on the child's patterns of responses, ability to accommodate to variations of a stimulus, and…