In this column, the author revisits who we are as assessment professionals, how we are trained, what our role is, and what our responsibilities are--to ourselves as a community, to our colleagues in education, at our institution, and to those we serve-- especially from an equity lens. They also share a few strategies to address the gaps they see.

In March 2022, Child Trends contracted with the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) to conduct an independent evaluation of Parent Aware, Minnesota's quality rating and improvement system (QRIS) for early care and education (ECE) programs. The evaluation, required by the 2021 Minnesota Legislature, includes several research activities…

Rooted in the idea that education is an open, dynamic system composed of a continuous interchange of components, this eye-opening resource presents a data-based, process-focused framework for solving the unique problems of your specific school or system. Counter to popular "quick fix" and intervention-based strategies, this book reflects…

Contemporary leadership scholars have been challenged by the need to develop well-educated citizens capable of tackling climate change and social and environmental sustainability. Across the levels of education, leadership has been applied largely to strategic and governance contexts. That is, dominant models of leadership comprise position-based…

Districts and schools constantly troubleshoot and mitigate new and ongoing challenges. Rather than addressing each challenge ad hoc, they are looking to adopt a systematic, repeatable process proven to diagnose and respond to challenges efficiently and effectively. One such approach with wide application and use in education is a Networked…

To be successful in producing improvement, assessment must be "part of a larger set of conditions that promote change" (Astin et al. 1992). To identify the enduring principles likely to produce the specific conditions to promote change, the author turned to two sources: (1) W. Edwards Deming's classic 1982 book, "Out of the Crisis:…

This article explains how UCL used micro-secondments to enable central registry and departmental staff to work together in the context of an on-going project to improve the student system, specifically to improve the processing of assessment results and calculation of progression and award outcomes and to improve module selection processes. This…

In education, the details are the daily practices in every classroom and every office, what the teachers, leaders, and support staff do in their roles to pursue the school's goals. A school's goals express the collective desires for each of its students, what the students know, what they are able to do, how they behave, and how they manage their…

Today, schools' climates impact every student across the globe (Thapa et al., 2013). "A positive school climate is critically related to school success" (National Center for Safe and Supportive Learning, 2021, para. 2). School climate consists of the many aspects of an educational atmosphere including the physical environment,…

Coaching is a popular and high-leverage instrument for instructional reform. Coaching holds potential to accelerate teacher learning and school improvement. Linking results from current research, we portray how coaching benefits from robust infrastructure. This article offers three design recommendations that leaders can implement to optimize…

Classical evaluation methods, assessments, exams, and so forth accentuate the perception of one against all, professor versus learners. Including students in the assessment process, allows transforming the professor from an opponent to a critical friend, with the role of helping students to recognize both their strengths and weaknesses. However,…

While overall graduation rates are improving, persistent disparities in graduation rates among groups of students remain, and must be addressed. High school reform is a viable approach to addressing these disparities. Early College High Schools, Small Schools of Choice, and Career Academies are all secondary school reform models that have been…

School improvement plans based on a year-long cycle are problematic; this approach often leads to efforts toward improvement being frustrated and goals not being met. Jackson explains why creating a 90-day plan focused on attacking one root problem at a time leads to greater improvement, giving an example of a struggling school she helped improve…

The purpose of this action research study was to identify needs and improve higher education administrators' digital technology knowledge and skills. Participants and data collected in Cycle 1 consisted of structured interviews and observations of subjects who, through academic credentialing or career attainment, were considered experts in the use…

This study adopted the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to extract learners' needs based on 70,145 reviews from online course designed for software design and development in China and then applied Quality Function Deployment (QFD) to map learners' differentiated needs into quality attributes. Taking national first-class courses as the…