A year ago, top officials in the school leadership world were worried. It seemed to them that principals were being overlooked in national conversations about how to get educators ready for the Common Core State Standards. But that is changing. The past six months have seen a surge of activity to acquaint principals with the new standards and…

This article considers the failure of theory to provide a workable model for academic standards in use. Examining the contrast between theoretical perspectives, it argues that there are four dimensions for which the academy has failed to provide an adequate theoretical account of standards: documented or tacit knowledge of standards; norm or…

Grading is often seen as a point of conflict with students and, in upper elementary and beyond, with parents. It is a chore that consumes time and saps critical levels of energy better used for creative planning and preparation and face-to-face interactions with students. Grading is sometimes referred to as a "necessary evil," yet many teachers…

This article examines whether and to what extent educational reforms in a post-conflict society conform to "global (regional) standards," and explores the meaning of inconsistencies observed in the process of global reform transfer. Among the nations of the world, nowhere is the influence of external forces on educational reforms more…

This article details what resulted when I re-designed my undergraduate statistics course to allow failure as a learning strategy and focused on achievement rather than performance. A variety of within and between sample t-tests are utilized to determine the impact of unlimited test and quiz opportunities on student learning on both quizzes and…

To meet the information literacy (IL) needs of chemistry students, The College of New Jersey's (TCNJ) Library and Chemistry Departments have created a three-year seminar with a strong IL component. The program focuses on IL skills necessary for success in industry and graduate or professional education, but may lack features specific to those…

How teachers make sense of new academic standards significantly shapes the implementation of those standards. Professional development organized around the analysis of mathematical tasks has potential to prepare teachers for standards implementation by helping them develop common understandings of standards and how to help students meet ambitious…

This Center for American Progress report examines whether states' adoption of standards-based policies predicts low-income students' NAEP achievement trends in fourth and eighth grade math and reading throughout the 2003-2013 decade. The report claims to analyze changes across five separate two-year intervals, but it only reports findings for…

This report presents a multi-year study of how states are implementing their state college- and career-readiness standards. In this report, the Southern Regional Education Board's (SREB's) Benchmarking State Implementation of College- and Career-Readiness Standards project studied state efforts in 2014-15 and 2015-16 to foster effective…

Educational organizations are facing severe problems in terms of competition, quality degradation and deteriorating standards. There is a need to identify, define, develop strategy, initiate action and solve the problem. The present research holds significance in the rapidity of changing environment that affects our educational organizations…

There are intersections that can occur between the respective peak Australian school education policy agendas. These policies include the use of technologies in classrooms to improve teaching and learning as promoted through the "Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians" and the "Australian Curriculum";…

A team of four librarians at the University of Houston (UH) Libraries partnered with the UH Office of Institutional Effectiveness and its Director of Assessment and Accreditation Services for General Education to conduct a campus-wide, exploratory assessment of undergraduate information literacy skills. The project evaluated a selection of…

This article explores the relationship between mass education, higher education quality and policy development in Australia in the period 2008-2014, during which access to higher education was significantly increased. Over this time, which included a change of national government, the discursive relationship between mass higher education and…

The purpose of this article is to present the new National Science Teachers Association-Standards for Science Teacher Preparation (NSTA-SSTP). The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) is the new national accreditation organization for programs of education. NSTA collaborates with CAEP to establish content specific standards…

The purpose of this paper is to furnish local and global stakeholders with detailed information regarding the development and current status of quality assurance in the Zimbabwean higher education sector. The study used document analysis, observation and interviews with key informants as sources of data. This paper addresses the dearth of…